


Getaway

by hollycomb



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Anxiety, Brothers, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Nature, Non-Consensual Mindreading, Past Child Abuse, Shore Leave, Trouble In Paradise, Twins, slavery mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 16:40:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 54,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9830060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollycomb/pseuds/hollycomb
Summary: Techie is surprised to have his shore leave request granted, allowing him to spend time with Matt on a forested moon where Matt is doing radar repair for the Order.Techie's reactions to fresh air, sunlight and fish are mixed, and then Matt drops a bombshell that could shatter the comforts of their little world together permanently.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A sequel to [Misfits](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7931377)! Part II coming soon~ Hux & Kylo are featured more in the next part. 
> 
>  
> 
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> 
> **

It’s difficult to define what constitutes a shitty workday as a Knight of Ren, but generally it involves Hux’s officers screwing something up, disappointment handed down coldly from Snoke, and/or the doing of menial tasks necessary to keep the First Order running, often met by scoffing criticisms from Hux because some tedious protocol or other wasn’t followed to the letter. Sometimes it’s all of this plus more general annoyances, like the E-deck gym running out of full-sized towels. 

“I have a complaint,” Ren says as he slams into Hux’s quarters after hours on an overall shitty day when this occurs. 

Hux is of course still awake, sitting at his work station with a mug of something medicinal and fragrant while he goes over the day’s logs like the obsessive micro-manager he is. He doesn’t look up as Ren stomps toward him, just blows into the steam rising from his mug and clicks from one log to the next on the screen. 

“Towel management is falling apart on E-deck,” Ren says. He grabs Hux’s swiveling office chair and spins it to face him when Hux attempts to continue with his work. “At the gym,” Ren clarifies. Hux looks sleepy and irritated, but this is serious. “It’s indicative of systemic failure on a larger scale,” Ren says, struggling to keep his voice below a shout, “If your people can’t even allocate the right amount of fucking towels to have on hand at the gym, where else are they falling behind? Security measures, shield maintenance? And this is the third time it’s happened.” 

“Sometimes I forget that you grew up with doting Republican parents who treated you like a little prince,” Hux says. “And then, somehow, I remember.” 

“This is not just about me. If your people aren’t provided with these kinds of basic necessities they will develop discontent, and discontent leads to muttered communal complaints, and those lead to rebellion and disaster.” 

“Yes, I’m sure the last rebellion that felled the Empire started with towels. If you weren’t provided one, why aren’t you dripping wet or sweat-soaked?” Hux scans Ren’s freshly showered body, his damp hair. Ren puts his shoulders back and allows him to observe. 

“There were small towels,” Ren says. “Inadequate ones. I had to use three to dry myself. It was a big pain in the ass, but that’s not the point. You’re not listening to my larger message here. I’m trying to help you lead. I’m among these people more often than you are, at this level.” 

“At the level of the gym? I suppose that’s true.” Hux rubs his hand over his face and sets his mug down. “Look-- All right, thank you. I’ll look into it. I agree that small things such as this matter, in a sense. Everything must run as smoothly as possible from the bottom up if an operation is to expect success from its many components. Well-spotted, Ren. I’ll make a note.” 

Ren isn’t sure if Hux is being sarcastic or not. He uses the Force to assess Hux’s mood and finds the usual things in his mind: exhaustion that he’s attempting to deny, worry that he’s constantly assuaging with plan-making and mental corrections, and the need to be picked up by Ren and carried to his bed, which Hux more consciously characterizes as simple arousal, a physical need like food and sleep, both of which he views as unfortunate burdens. Ren can respect this outlook; he feels much the same. It’s one reason why Hux is an ideal partner in partaking of the physical need for sexual release, at least for the time being. 

“Was your day unsatisfactory, too?” Ren asks. 

Hux smiles a little. “Yes,” he says. “Somewhat. I’m puzzling over this odd request at the moment, and I don’t know why it’s troubling me so much.” 

“What request?”

“It’s from that jumpy technician who used to be a slave,” Hux says, swiveling his chair back around so that he’s facing his monitors. He pulls up a leave request with Techie’s ident photo attached. Techie is visibly nervous in the holo portrait, shoulders inching upward under his technician’s jumpsuit. “He wants to take his leave on Jungka, that moon where we’re currently doing single-service radar repair. I’ve got one man down there working, his roommate.” 

“His fuck buddy,” Ren says, smirking. “That’s funny. He wants to go down there and hang around while Matt works on the repairs? Seems like some kind of codependency issue.” 

“Whatever it is, it’s unusual to grant a shore leave to a place like Jungka where there’s really nothing but wilderness around our radar station. No proper lodgings, for example, beyond the bunk inside the station where his roommate is staying during the job.” 

“Aw, let him go.” Ren hears himself sounding like his father and shrugs when Hux looks up at him. “What’s the harm? He’s only asking for three days.” 

“Yes, and the radar repair is scheduled to be finished in three days, so they would return together. I don’t know. Something about this is giving me a headache. Normally I’d just reject the request if I had any sort of strange feeling, but somehow in this case that seems inordinately cruel, and as you say, it’s dangerous to engender petty grudges in the crew. Especially in someone like Techie, who holds so many of our security strings together.”   

“He’s not irreplaceable,” Ren says, thinking of some of the things he sensed from Techie’s battered mind when they shared a lift once. “And I doubt he’s up to anything. I sensed uncommon loyalty to the Order when I scanned his mind.” 

“Was that before or after this fuck buddy dependency took root?” 

“Uh, before? What difference does it make?” 

“I suppose you’re right.” Hux taps a button on his console and a GRANTED stamp appears over Techie’s request. “Maybe I’m only thrown by this eerie portrait,” Hux says, staring at Techie’s ident holo. “Does he look like me, a bit?” 

“You’re delirious.” Ren’s heart starts to beat faster. He’d rather Hux not continue this line of inquiry. “C’mon, work time is over.” He slaps the button that powers off the holo workstation display and hoists Hux up from the chair, ignoring his protests and lifting him fully into his arms. “Should you even be processing individual leave requests yourself, General?”

“Only unusual ones like that. You know how I like to keep a firm hold on things.” Hux squirms in Ren’s arms but goes limp with surrender when Ren lays him on the bed and crawls over him. “Take your shoes off,” Hux says, stifling a yawn but also beginning to get hard inside his off-duty sweatpants. 

Ren toes his gym shoes off and pours himself down onto Hux, giving them both a moment to simply revel in the contact, the heat of their bodies sliding together and the push of breath from Ren’s chest against Hux’s, the anticipation of by now familiar coupling that Ren still looks forward a great deal after all these years. Hux knows how to keep things interesting, though it’s likely tonight will involve only the most standard fare, as tired as he is: an exchange of oral attention in the places each of them prefers it, a slow face-to-face fuck, some kissing, then sleep. 

“Have you ever wanted to follow me on an away mission?” Ren asks, his lips moving over the soft skin just below Hux’s ear. “Ever been tempted to call it shore leave and come along, with a rifle slung over your shoulder? Down in the trenches with me?”

“The trenches.” Hux snorts and bumps his nose against Ren’s cheek, asking for a kiss. “No,” he says when Ren only nips at his mouth, teasing. “I can’t say that I have ever wanted that.” 

“Liar.” 

“I am not! I don’t want to go on missions with you and those Knights, not even a little bit. Not even for curiosity’s sake.”

Hux is still lying, but Ren lets it slide. 

“You miss me, though,” he says, leaning back a bit when Hux strains again for a kiss on the lips. He tends to need them most when he’s drowsy like this, overworked. “When I’m gone, you long for my return. Admit that much.” 

“Not after only two days.” 

“Two days?”

“That’s how long Matt has been away from his-- person.”

Ren kisses Hux deeply, doing what he can to hide his grin against Hux’s soft lips and wet tongue. Hux has never called Ren his _person_ before, even indirectly like this. It’s more than Ren would have expected when it comes to what sort of word Hux might choose for him and for what they have together. Hux has called it their _arrangement_ , a convenience, also an inconvenience, and he’s called Ren many things, but this is new, and for reasons surely having to do with the irrational but undeniable appeal of Hux’s warm mouth and writhing, eager body, it feels restorative, like a commendation that makes this day a satisfactory one after all. 

 

**

Techie packs, unpacks and repacks his bag three times while he waits to report to the shuttle bay. He’s afraid to sleep, afraid that doing so would mean waking from this dream. He really didn’t think his leave request would get approved, and was afraid that even asking would even result in some kind of punishment, though logically he couldn’t work out where that fear came from, exactly. Tracing his fears back to their nonexistent sources is a method he’s been using a lot since Matt left the ship to do repairs on a moon that Matt’s comm messages describe as ‘perfect’ for Techie’s introduction to the kind of place they talk about in bed at night, the kind of place where Matt lived before the Order took him. He’s been begging Techie to try to come down and visit him on shore leave ever since he arrived there. 

Now it’s actually happening, Techie walking to the shuttle bay in his civilian clothes, his bag mostly full of other civilian clothes slung over his shoulder, and it still feels impossible. He’s fidgety, seeing things at the corners of his eyes as they focus and refocus, scanning every corridor he turns down for some danger that’s not really there. This happens when he approaches any sort of uncertain territory, and though the initial approval of his request make him laugh in joy at the thought of seeing Matt after two long cycles without him, he’s regretting this whole plan as he boards a small, almost claustrophobia-inducing shuttle piloted by a droid that makes him confirm his identity with a fingerprint scan once he’s on board. 

“Confirm destination,” the droid says. It has only a mouth-slit where a face would be on a humanoid. “Course set for: Jungka, moon of Tinu-4, one-way trip.” 

“Confirmed,” Techie says, doing his best not to stutter. The phrase ‘one-way trip’ seems ominous, even though he knows he’s been booked to return along with Matt on the shuttle that’s already scheduled to retrieve him three cycles from now. 

The last time he was on a shuttle was his trip from the slaver’s auction to the _Finalizer_. He’d still had his restraint collar on, and his head had been shaved prior to the auction, his naked scalp on fire with a bad sunburn that made him feel like his entire skull would burst like rotten fruit spoiled by the sun, everything throbbing. He hasn’t been on any moon or planet or even a space station since he roasted under the sun that day, anticipating brutal slavery based on the grim expressions and starched military uniforms of his purchasers. All he knew about the First Order was that they were considered a dangerous terrorist group by several small governments whose systems he’d hacked into over the years. That seemed like a step down from being owned by a gang of less ambitious criminals, in terms of potential for misery.

He was cowering when he first came aboard the _Finalizer_ , wheezing and squinting and waiting to be chained to a console in corner somewhere and whipped for not coding fast enough or accurately enough, best case scenario. In quarantine the ship’s doctors diagnosed him with a list of ailments as long as his arm: post-traumatic stress disorder, various infected scabs and cuts, a pronounced eye infection, second-degree burns from sun exposure. He screamed and fought when they put him in a bacta tank, thinking he would be euthanized within it since his diagnosis had proved so poor; surely he wasn’t worth the trouble of healing. 

When he awoke he was alone in a quiet medbay room for several days in relative comfort, seen only by a nurse who seemed to pity him and a young officer who interviewed him about his coding skills. Neither of them beat him or even went out of their way to belittle him, and he wasn’t drugged again after his initial flailing panic. For years afterward, as his hair grew back in and all the way down to his shoulders, he felt like he was always holding his breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then Matt came along, and it was if the opposite happened: suddenly he looked down and found that he was wearing a pair of fine boots, a perfect fit that seemed beautifully made just for him, the kind that would keep him safe and dry in any terrain. 

The thought of terrain makes his lungs squeeze up as he stares out the shuttle’s viewport at the moon they’re approaching, post-hyperjump. He tells himself over and over that he’s not actually approaching the unknown: he’s headed toward Matt, who will pull Techie into his arms and hold him safely within whatever atmosphere surrounds them, wherever they end up. 

Techie shrieks when the shuttle lands with a graceless jolt, throttling him against his seat’s chest restraint. He clutches his bag to his chest as dust rises up around the landed vehicle. His face flames with embarrassment, though only a droid heard that shameful noise. He’s trying to be better about not humiliating himself with overreactions, for Matt’s sake if not his own, and it’s easy on some days, with Matt at his side or waiting for him in their room. On other days even the sound of  a small platoon of stormtroopers marching in controlled unison through the ship’s hallways will make him want to curl into a corner and hide, as if they’re coming for him. 

“You are disembarking here,” the droid says, with a harshness that probably has more to do with its standard programming than any insult it means to direct at Techie, who is hesitating and peering out the viewport at the soaring trees that surround the clearing where they’ve landed. From inside the shuttle the trees look like giants who will soon cast their judgment down upon him: a puny, trembling creature who is not native to their homeworld. 

“Th-thank you,” Techie says to the droid, needlessly. It doesn’t answer, just stares, still waiting for him to summon the courage to disembark.

Techie knew that Matt wouldn’t be able to meet him at the landing site. He’ll already be at work on the radar repair that has kept him busy during the regular day shift cycles since he left. They’ve exchanged messages only during Matt’s off cycles, and they stayed connected on their comms all throughout their usual resting hours that first night Matt was away, Matt begging Techie to try to join him here and Techie waffling like the undeserving coward that he is. He takes a deep breath and unbuckles his seat restraint as he exhales, reminding himself that every step he takes away from this shuttle, along the path ahead that leads to the radar station, will bring him closer to Matt. 

His vision tunnels as he steps out into warm sunlight cut through by a chilly wind. It’s not cold enough to require a jacket but just on the verge, and something about the air seems _too_ breathable. Techie’s heart is slamming as he squints at his surroundings, and he bolts when he hears the shuttle’s engines firing behind him, afraid he’ll be scorched by the blast of its lift-off. Once he’s at a safe distance he turns back and watches it go, feeling briefly abandoned before he turns for the dirt path and hurries along it in a near-jog, trying not to breathe too deeply or look too long at anything around him. He’ll breathe when he’s with Matt; he’ll see the beauty Matt has claimed this place holds when he’s with Matt. Even their bland little room on the ship is so beautiful to Techie now, when Matt is there with him and even when he isn’t, though the shadows have seemed too tall the past few cycles, without the promise of Matt soon returning to join him in bed.

The sight of the radar station up ahead is comforting, not just because he knows Matt is there but because it’s industrial, cold durasteel standing sturdy against the trees that wave menacingly in the wind. He supposes he knew that leaves make noise when they rustle together, but he’d forgotten and he sort of hates it. It’s setting his teeth on edge, too much like the whispers of people in the mess when he passes by, and still he feels like he’s being watched by the sheer tallness of the flora. Even the weeds along the path are too tall, moving with the wind like accomplices. 

The two stormtroopers who are milling about in front of the radar station are a welcome sight on one hand, part of what he expected to find here, but Techie has never trusted stormtroopers and has come to like them even less since becoming the regular audience for Matt’s many complaints about them. Neither of these stormtroopers have their helmets on. One is a man, the other a woman, both young. Matt has complained about these two specifically in his recent comm messages, and has also boasted that he’s been given use of their quarters while he’s here doing repairs. Techie can see the tent they’ve been sleeping in, set up near the radar tower. He freezes when they hold their blasters across their chests and fix him with unfriendly stares. 

“Registration number,” the woman prompts. “And come closer, so we can hear you.” 

“It’s-- it’s TH-7890,” Techie says, holding his hands up, his bag slung across his chest. He hasn’t referred to himself by number in a long time. At the orphanage he was M-Eighteen. If he ever had a real name, he doesn’t know what it was.

“Cleared to approach,” the woman trooper says, lowering her blaster. “Relax, technician.” She glances at her partner, who smirks. “You’re supposed to be on shore leave, we heard.”

“I-- Ah, yes, I’m supposed to be, supposed to be meeting my fellow technician, his name is Matt, is he--” 

“He’s inside,” the male trooper says, nodding to a narrow door that the two troopers are now flanking. “Working, supposedly.” 

“You’re here to help him?” the woman says. She’s smirking now, too.

“I--” Techie doesn’t want to lie, but it seems crass to state his actual purpose here, and they’re already making fun of him. “Yes, I-- Yes, thank you.” 

He dashes for the door and pretends he can’t hear them snickering as if he passes through it, into a dark and empty room with nothing but a twisting flight of durasteel stairs in its center. The door shuts fast and heavy behind him and he shouts in surprise, hating the way the sound of his cowardice echoes around the empty room. He can hear noises from the second floor, tools being set on durasteel and the dull buzzing of a mechano-diagnostic machine. His legs are shaking as he starts up the stairs, because what if what awaits him up there is not actually Matt but the culmination of some kind of cruel trick? The approval for his leave had seemed to come from General Hux himself, which was unexpected, and what if this is all an elaborate ruse designed to humiliate him or even to harm him?

He heads up the stairs with his arms crossed over his bag, holding it over his chest like a shield. He’s keenly aware of how ridiculous he’s being, thinking that everything that’s taken place surrounding this entire repair mission might only be only a trap set for him, but by the time he reaches the second floor his eyes are whirring and darting about in every direction, looking for the danger that might be waiting. 

Instead he finds himself in an open room with durasteel walls and durasteel floors, four big coolant windows all open to views of the trees outside. The room is stifling hot anyway, and loud with the hum of machinery. The radar station’s gut mechanics are housed in the column at the center, several panels hanging open and a single technician seated on the floor beside one, wearing magno goggles and headphones that are plugged into the column’s monitoring system. His blond hair is a mess, he’s shirtless and glistening with sweat from this neck down to the small of this back, his foggy glasses folded on the floor beside his tool kit. He’s Matt, as promised, so hard at work that he hasn’t noticed Techie’s approach. 

Techie feels himself beaming with relief as his shoulders relax. He takes slow, careful steps forward, not wanting to startle Matt. When he’s halfway there Matt sees his movements from the corner of his magno-goggle view and looks up, blinking at Techie from behind the thick goggles, which magnify his eyes in a way that makes Techie laugh. 

“Shit-- You’re here!” Matt jumps up, forgetting to take his headphones off, and the cord rips from the monitor, yanking the headphone set off his ears in the process. He curses again and tosses the headset to the floor as Techie drops his bag and hurries forward, arms outstretched. Matt shoves the goggles up onto his head and lifts Techie wholly off the floor when they come together, both of them moaning with relief as Techie wraps around him and clings. 

“Oh,” Techie says, one hand sliding through the sweat on Matt’s back and the other pushing up into his damp curls. Techie's eyes are closed, pleasure coursing through him like a sedative as he squeezes his legs tight around Matt’s waist. “Oh, you-- You smell so good, fuck--”

“I smell like a gym locker,” Matt says. He pulls back to kiss Techie’s face in three different places, then settles on his lips. “Sorry I’m all sweaty.” 

“I don’t care,” Techie says, laughing. He kisses Matt again, tugs fondly on his hair and sighs against his mouth. “I can’t believe I’m here,” he says, wanting to apologize for the giddiness that’s making him feel weightless in Matt’s arms. 

“Did you see the trees?” 

“Of course I saw them, they’re enormous.” Techie cowers a little after saying so, chews his lip. “It was weird, being on a shuttle, like I thought.” 

“But you did it, and you’re here.” Matt buries his face against Techie’s neck and takes a deep breath there, rocking him a little. “I’m proud of you,” he says, very seriously, when he pulls back to face him again. 

“Thanks?” 

Techie fidgets until Matt sets him down on his feet. “I don’t want to interrupt your work,” he says, worry creeping back in when he glances at the panels that are hanging open, wires spilling out and censors blinking. 

“I get a lunch break in a couple hours,” Matt says. He’s got both hands on Techie’s ass, and the heat and size of them is disturbingly arousing, in this setting. Everything about Matt’s current situation is, in fact: his bare chest, sweat-damp skin, even the goggle marks around his eyes. “I’ll be done for the day at sundown,” he says, giving Techie’s ass a gentle squeeze that makes him stumble forward, wanting. “Gotta quit when it gets dark because there’s no illumination in the station. It’s not allowed.” 

“Not allowed?”

“For concealment purposes. The station is supposed to look like a tree, from space. There’s fake leaves at the top. Did you see them?”

“No, ah--”

“So at night there’s just moonlight. It’s fucking awesome.” 

“Awesome?” 

Techie cringes at the thought of getting through the nights here without so much as a flashlight. His eyes have built-in night vision and he generally prefers dim lighting, even darkness, but only in familiar spaces. 

“You’ll love it, you’ll see.” Matt draws his hands up to Techie’s shoulders and grins. He’s flushed with happiness, radiating contentment now that Techie is here to see the moon he’s been gushing about for two cycles. “You want to go upstairs and rest while I finish up down here?”

“Ah--” Techie bites away the urge to say that he’d rather stay down here in the hot reactor chamber and watch Matt work or maybe even help him. Then he realizes that while Matt is glad to see him he’s also trying to get Techie out of his way while he works; this is just a polite shove in the right direction. “Yeah,” Techie says, nodding, though the thought of being alone in this place, even with Matt just one floor away, makes his stomach curdle. “Sure, um. Just show me the way.” 

A narrow flight of stairs leads up to the dormitory room where the stormtroopers who guard this station normally reside. It’s smaller than the rooms below, the tower tapering toward the pointed top, but at least four times the size of Techie and Matt’s room back on the _Finalizer_. Like the room below, there are four windows, all of them open to let a cool breeze sail through the room. 

“Pretty great,” Matt says, shouting this from the bottom of the stairs when Techie looks nervously back down at him. “Right?” 

“Right-- Yeah, totally, right.” 

Techie attempts a smile: he should feel fine, he _is_ fine, Matt is here, and surely in a moment their surroundings won’t seem like a devouring army of uncertainties just on the other side of these walls, and the breeze won’t feel like their battle cry pouring in through the windows. 

“Can I shut the windows?” Techie asks. 

“It’ll get all hot and stuffy up there if you do.” 

Matt’s brow pinches a little: with disappointment, of course. Techie is already ruining this for him. 

“Oh-- Then-- Then I’ll leave them open, okay, that’s fine.” 

“If you want--”

“No, it’s fine, really! I’m okay, I’ll just be-- Up here. I’m fine.” 

Matt gives Techie an uncertain look, then he’s smiling again. 

“I’m so fucking glad you’re here,” he says, his voice lowering in a way that tugs at Techie’s gut. “This is gonna be amazing. Like a real-- A real life. I got something for us to eat for lunch. Hope you’re hungry.” 

“I am, um-- sounds great!” 

Techie suppresses the urge to ask what Matt could have possibly _gotten_ for their lunch here, on an uninhabited moon with no commissary and no market. He’s not actually hungry, everything in him all pinched up with dread. The fact that he can’t shed his persistent terror even with Matt here is such a tremendous personal failure that he can’t focus on any of the details of the room as he walks into the center. All he can think about is his own building, stupid, useless panic. He sets his bag on the floor and then sits down beside it, closes his eyes and forces himself to take three slow, steady breaths. After he’s exhaled the third one he opens his eyes and tries again to appreciate whatever Matt loves so much about this place. 

He looks first to the windows, hunching his shoulders when the trees wave their leaves at him from outside. The air smells good; he can at least recognize that, though he can’t put words to most of the scents beyond ‘flora’ and ‘clean.’ The room itself is homey, though sparsely furnished. Instead of durasteel, the floor is made of polished wooden boards. There’s a double bed built into the wall. Techie is surprised to see only one, thinking the stormtroopers are therefore expected to share it, then he realizes they must take turns sleeping in shifts while the other guards the radar tower. There are few personal touches beyond a rug made from some reeds that look hand-woven and some holorecords stacked on a small shelf against the wall near the bed. There’s a little kitchenette with a stove and conservator, and a washroom with a stall shower. Techie smiles at the sight of it. Even if it’s just a sonic, the idea of having privacy while showering is idyllic. 

The presence of the shower cheers him enough to allow him to stand and take a few more deep breaths as he walks toward the bed to examine the quality of the sheets. They’re the usual standard-issue Order set, but there’s also a blanket that looks lovingly worn. Touching it, Techie feels bad for the stormtroopers outside, evicted from the comforts of their home until the radar repair is complete. No wonder they were jerks to him. He’ll be sleeping in their bed while he’s here. 

The thought of sleep makes him yawn, and when he drops to a seat on the bed he allows himself to realize how exhausted he is. On his first night aboard the _Finalizer_ without Matt he didn’t even attempt sleep, and the following night he couldn’t fight it but woke frequently from terrible dreams, panting in the dark with no one to comfort him. He’d held the pillow that smelled like Matt’s hair against his chest, wore one of Matt’s sweatshirts to bed, but nothing resembling real rest came. 

When he can’t hold his eyes open any longer he stretches out on the bed and drags the pillow against his face. The pillowcase must have been laundered prior to Matt’s arrival, because it only smells like him. Techie smiles against it and listens to the comforting sounds of Matt working downstairs: footsteps on durasteel, tools being sorted through and set down, the faint hum of the open panels and the monitor. In combination with these things, the rustling noise of the leaves outside isn’t so bad. Techie falls asleep as he feels his anxious energy lighten, lifting from him as if carried away by the breeze that makes him shiver atop the bedclothes.  

Matt is there when he opens his eyes, pulling off his uniform pants along with his underwear. He turns to look at Techie when he’s wearing nothing but his glasses, grins when he sees Techie blinking awake. 

“Gonna take a shower and then make you something to eat,” Matt says. Techie has never seen him look so excited about a plan. 

“Can we both fit?” Techie asks, though he knows the answer to this question. Before he fell asleep he was looking at the shower stall with this specifically in mind. 

“Yes, and there’s water,” Matt says, sounding almost emotional. He swallows. “Hot, even.” 

“We have hot water on the ship,” Techie says. He’s sitting up, stretching, unable to keep a smile off his face. 

“Yeah, but this is different, fresher. There’s a lake not far from here, and a creek in the woods. I haven’t walked far enough to find a river. But the creek is pretty, uh. It’s a good creek.” 

All this talk of bodies of water makes Techie nervous, but he’s excited, too. He stands and walks to Matt, who is still sweat-sticky and breathing a bit hard, as if agitated by his own descriptions of what awaits Techie here. Techie pulls off his shirt and reaches for Matt’s hips. For a while they just peer at each other, swaying a bit and touching their noses together, Matt getting hard against Techie’s thigh.

“Missed you,” Matt says, mumbling. 

“I was, like, sub-functional without you.” 

He hasn’t showered since Matt left the ship, for example. When he thinks about this he feels pathetic, but it’s okay. Matt knows he’s pathetic. He forgives it, loves Techie anyway. 

The shower stall is bliss, the kind of comfortably contained space that Techie craves and revels in when he can hold Matt in it with him, against him. It feels good to wash after two cycles of skipping his nightly shower, feels good to rub idly against Matt and gasp into his mouth when their cocks slide together. They take their time, relishing the reconnection and laughing in nervous outbursts when there’s no way to contain their relief. Back on the ship they fool around in the communal shower on occasion, but Techie is always at least a little bit on edge, afraid the door will open behind them. It’s no secret that they fuck, but he doesn’t want to be seen when he’s like this: punchy and pinked-up by the hot water, humping himself against every part of Matt that he can reach with his cock.

“Did you jerk off?” Matt asks, fingers digging into Techie’s ass cheeks. “While I was gone?”

“No! I was-- I don’t know, mildly depressed? I didn’t even look at holoporn. Did you?” 

“Can’t stream holoporn here on my off cycles, it would give off too much light.” 

“I meant did you jerk off,” Techie says, grinning. He’s going to come just from this, just from rubbing against Matt while the hot water courses over them. 

“Oh. Yeah, a couple times. Thinking of you.” 

“What did you think, ah-- think about?” 

“This,” Matt says, squeezing Techie’s ass. “And your noises. The way you say my name. You only say my name when we’re fucking, have you ever thought about that?” 

“What?” Techie goes still, feels terrible. “I’m sorry, I didn’t--”

“No, it’s okay, it’s good. There’s really no reason to say each other’s names otherwise. I realized that when I was away from you. Normally we’re just always together. I don’t even have to call to you from across a room or anything. And then that makes it better, at least for me. Hearing you say my name during sex. Like it’s sacred.” 

“Sacred.” Techie nods and glues himself to Matt from his ankles to his shoulders, presses his face to Matt’s neck and closes his eyes. He never cared about what he was called before he had Matt. The various numbers assigned to him felt just as right as anything else, and interchangeable. Now he feels like he should have a real name, one that would be worthy of the way Matt says _Techie_ , as if it’s sacred. 

“Can I--” Matt asks, kneading at Techie’s ass. 

“Can you what?” 

“Can I use my mouth?” Matt’s fingers wiggle in to tease at Techie’s freshly cleaned hole, so there will be no mistaking. “I always want to, in the shower,” he says. “But it’s not, uh. Intimate enough, on the ship.” 

“You can use your mouth wherever you like,” Techie says. He pulls free, puts his back against the wall of the narrow shower stall and then turns around, pressing his ass out for Matt’s inspection. 

It’s always good, but there is something especially amazing about having this while the water beats between Techie’s shoulderblades, streaming down over his hole as Matt works it with his tongue, holding his cheeks open with both hands. Techie moans, probably too loud, and muffles his mouth with his hands when he considers the stormtroopers snickering downstairs. He’s close now, rubbing his cock against the shower wall while Matt licks into him. It chafes a little but he can’t help it, can’t keep still.

“Techie,” Matt says, breathless with what sounds like wonder. “Tell me-- Talk to me. Missed your voice so much.” 

“My stupid voice?” Techie laughs, and Matt grunts as he gives him a sucking kiss against all those tender, tingling nerves. He doesn’t like it when Techie refers to himself as stupid, weak, hopeless. Techie didn’t even really mean it like that, though he does hate the sound of his own voice. “Ah, I-- Matt, please-- Touch me, touch my dick--”

Matt hurries to obey, his big hand sliding up between Techie’s thighs as they spread a little further for him, his feet sliding to the full width of the shower stall. Techie again moans too loudly when Matt squeezes his cock and returns his attentions to Techie’s ass, pleasuring both in a way that feels greedy and selfless all at once. Techie fidgets happily in Matt’s grip, whining and clawing at the wall of the shower as his climax builds. 

“Want you inside me,” he moans, remembering that Matt asked him to talk. “Not now-- Later. All night. M-Matt, I-- Want to warm your dick all night, want to, to hold you inside me and squeeze around you and drive you crazy--” 

Matt moans, takes his hand from Techie’s dick, and when his lips shudder against Techie’s hole it’s obvious that he’s coming, pumping himself onto the shower floor while he’s still got his face buried in Techie’s ass. Techie presses his hips back and gasps when Matt spins him around, stands and grabs his dick again, still panting from his own release. 

“Yes,” Matt says, eyes boring into Techie’s. “All night. It gets cold here after sundown. Gonna be in you all night, nice and warm, gonna get you so open and wide and loose, just how you like it--”

Techie groans and falls against Matt when he comes, shaking all over. He can’t remember the last time he went two full cycles without beating off. It was probably during those first weeks after Matt had moved in, whereas he’d once jerked off four or five times per cycle if he was feeling particularly aroused by a new cache of holoporn he’d hacked into on the Order’s network. It took him a while to trust the feeling, but once he became comfortable with the idea that his tiny room was truly private, for the first time in his life, he went wild. 

He’s dozy again when he’s dried off and lounging on the bed, watching Matt make the lunch that he’s so excited about. It involves mushrooms that he picked himself, and he assures Techie that they’re safe to eat, also delicious. They smell good, anyway, frying in a pan with salt and some spices and “real” butter, according to Matt, whatever that means. While they’re cooking Matt digs into the conservator and shows Techie a fish he caught in the lake: big and shiny with silvery scales, it will be their dinner. 

“The lake is insane,” Matt says, his back to Techie while he continues working at the stove, wearing only a fresh pair of standard-issue briefs. “It’s almost totally untouched, full of fish, I was worried I wouldn’t remember how, but catching one was so easy, I can show you--” 

Techie laughs under his breath and Matt turns back to look at him, pushing his glasses up on his nose. 

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing. You’re just so happy. I’ve never seen you like this.” 

“I’m always happy, with you.” 

“Yeah, but this is more, like, I don’t know. Manic? It’s funny.” 

“Shut up.” Matt makes a kiss-face to show Techie he wasn’t serious. Even the gentlest teasing can set Techie on edge at times, but not now. He’s smiling, comfortable. Maybe Matt was right about this place.

Matt serves the fried mushrooms atop slices of the same regulation bread they have in the mess back on the ship, dusted with some syntho cheese powder. Techie is expecting to have to be polite about the taste, but it’s actually incredibly good, rich and flavorful, unlike anything he’s had in years. Even the bread is perfectly toasted. 

“What other secret talents do you have?” Techie asks when he accepts a second slice heaped with mushrooms.

“I can climb trees,” Matt says. “If that counts.” 

“Um, yeah! Sounds impressive.” Actually it sounds rather frightening: the thought of Matt scaling one of the giants outside, ascending to dangerous heights. 

Matt dresses after eating, gives Techie a buttery kiss and descends the stairs to continue his work. Techie wants to go with him but resists the urge to be a distracting tag-along and remains upstairs, poking through the holorecords available on the room’s shelf. When nothing there interests him he digs out his data pad and returns to the bed, stretching out on top of the blanket to browse his usual comms. He finds his gaze drifting from the screen to the windows as the light outside changes and the wind picks up, sunset approaching and the shadows of waving branches thrown across the room’s floor. It’s still eerie, but also nice.

It’s been a long time since he lounged around doing nothing. Back home on the ship he’s always working at his station in the room until Matt returns, and sometimes for a few hours afterward. It doesn’t feel right to be lazing about, but it also doesn’t feel as bad as he feared it would. There’s a sense of getting away with something that’s making his toes curl inside his socks, not unlike the way they did when he was first sharing a bed with Matt, feeling the steady push of Matt’s breath against his back as he drifted into sleep.

He’s almost slipped into another nap when the sun starts going down fast and his anxiety returns, pricking at him until he’s fully awake. Leaving his data pad on the bed, he walks to the stairs that lead down to the second floor and peeks into the rapidly darkening room below. Matt is closing up panels, packing away tools. Techie feels stupid for having needed to reassure himself with the sight, and he hurries to the nearest window. He’s pretending to be calmly looking out at the oncoming night when he hears Matt’s footsteps on the stairs. Outside, the stormtroopers are dousing a campfire they used to cook their dinner. 

“Just like you told me,” Techie says, attempting a confident smile and pointing. They’ve talked about campfire construction before, and fishing, trees (though not the climbing of them, that’s new), and all manner of things that are now right outside this open window, seeming to kiss Techie’s nervously goosebumped skin as he looks out at them. Matt drops his toolkit and joins Techie at the window, wrapping both arms around him as they observe the last of the sunset. It’s more pink and purple than Techie expected; he remembers the sunsets seen from the orphanage windows and elsewhere as purely orange. “How’s the repair going?” Techie asks when Matt nuzzles at his neck. He’s sweaty again, but Techie doesn’t mind. 

“It’s tedious,” Matt says. “But I’m keeping to schedule. I’m gonna rinse off and then cook that fish before it gets too dark.” 

“Can I, like, help?” 

“If you want, sure. I’ll be right back.” 

Matt heads for the shower, shedding his uniform and briefs on his way there. Techie glances at the stove and tries not to cower at the sight of it. He has no idea how to operate a cooking apparatus of even moderate sophistication. When he lived with Ma-Ma’s gang he had a rehydrator in his control room, but that was only a matter of pressing a button and waiting for a timer to go off. 

By the time Matt is dressed in some off-duty sweatpants and ready to cook, there’s just a faint glow from the windows, and new sounds are coming from the surrounding trees: clicks and croaks, bird calls. They sound menacing to Techie, and he hovers near Matt while he works in the near-dark. Surely these are not the ideal conditions for using a very sharp knife, but Matt doesn’t hesitate to whip one out from a drawer in the kitchenette and begin cleaning the fish in the kitchen sink. 

“Caught this guy at dawn this morning,” he says, bumping Techie’s hip with his own while Techie stands watching, wondering how often Matt cooked in the dark as a child. “Have you ever had fresh fish?”

“Ah, I don’t think so?” 

Might he be allergic? He’s had fish from cans before, but he’s never been exposed to any fresh food in this system. He wonders if there’s a medical kit on hand somewhere. Surely there must be? For most of the remainder of the meal preparation, he frets in silence about whether or not it would be weird and annoying to ask Matt about the availability of emergency medical supplies.

“Maybe I should do that,” Techie says when his night-vision clicks on. Matt’s fingers are far too close to the blade of the knife, and Techie would rather lose a hand than see Matt cut himself, and what if he bled out before they could get him proper medical attention, and Techie had to stand watching, what if it was his fault for coming down here at all and making Matt want to impress him by deboning a fish in the fucking dark--     

“No offense,” Matt says, still working bones from the fish as if he’s done it a million times. “But this part isn’t really for beginners.”

“It’s just-- So dark.” What if he misses a bone? What if one of them chokes-- Or worse, swallows a tiny bone and wakes up in agony with their stomach bleeding, much too internally damaged already to be saved? 

“I’m good,” Matt says. “Almost done. You can fire up the pan if you want. It’s an auto-start stove.” 

Techie doesn’t know what that means. He glances at the stove, wishing they were back on the ship, in the safety of their room, after a bland but dependable mess hall dinner. 

“Uh. Which, like-- Is there a button, or--”

“Babe,” Matt says. Techie flushes. He likes this nickname but always feels like a faker when he hears it, like it’s something he hasn’t really earned. “I’ve got it here, I’m good, you don’t need to do anything. You can set the table, if you want. All the plates and stuff are up there in the cabinet.” 

Techie doesn’t know how to set a table! But he nods and reaches for the plates with shaking hands, telling himself that Matt won’t be upset if he puts the silverware in the wrong order or something like that. Matt grew up in a tree. He’s probably not particular about place settings. 

By the time the meal is finished and the table is inexpertly set, the cool, greenish light from the neighboring moon has illuminated the room enough that Techie’s night vision mode has switched off. There’s a distant light from the planet they’re orbiting, too, and between this and the smell of the food, Techie is beginning to feel less like someone may bleed out or die in agony for whatever other reason before the night is through. He smiles when Matt sits down across from him and pushes his feet forward to lock around his under the table. It’s something they do in the mess at times, but it feels better here, where no one can see them and laugh. 

“How do you like it?” Matt asks, staring at Techie with intense scrutiny while he chews his first bite of fish. 

“Good, great, it’s wonderful!” Techie actually preferred the mushrooms, but this is fine. 

“How about that moonlight?” Matt asks, gesturing to the window. “It’s perfect, right?”

“Totally!” 

“We can go for a walk after dinner,” Matt says, as if this is a normal thing to suggest, as standard as brushing their teeth before bed. “I’ll show you around.” 

“Uh.” Techie can’t vocalize anything further, his stomach plummeting and his mouth going dry, despite the buttery fish residue. A walk after dinner. In the dark, by the light of the moon. Through the woods, which are still making all those sounds that started up after sundown and some now that are worse, the screeching of unseen insects seeming to grow louder as Techie sits trembling and contemplating a stroll beneath those enormous trees as they sway in the darkness, staring down at two tiny flecks of human life and, and-- He doesn’t actually think trees will _attack_ them, but things living in the trees could. “What’s the animal life here like?” he asks, trying not to sound terrified. 

“Pretty standard,” Matt says. “Birds, fish, furry things that run when you come near. Don’t worry,” he says, looking up from his plate. “They gave me a blaster.” 

“What! You, why, because, something might--” 

“Just for personal safety. It’s, uh. Locked on stun only.” 

Matt seems annoyed by this, and Techie thinks of his resentment for the stormtroopers, who certainly have fully functioning blasters and probably a backup or two somewhere. He feels panicked anew by the thought of weapons lurking around the camp, of Matt carrying even a stun-locked blaster, and suddenly the blunt knife he’s using on his fish seems like a thing that might be used against him, too, like all the knives he knew before his days on the _Finalizer_ , where nobody has ever cut him, and probably nobody down here wants to, but they could, technically, it could happen.

“You don’t like it?” Matt says when he notices that Techie has stopped eating.

“No, I-- What, no! It’s great, I’m sorry, I was just, uh. Thinking.” 

“It’s okay if you don’t like it. Not everybody likes fish.” 

“I like it! I love it, I’m sorry, it’s just a lot, it’s--” Techie glances at the window, holding his fork in his fist. “Um. What are those, like. Noises?” 

“What noises?”

“It’s like, like-- Bugs, I think?” 

“Oh, yeah. It was like that at night on my planet, when I was growing up. I don’t even notice it. They won’t hurt you, they’re just flyhoppers and--”

“I know, I’m sorry, I’m being stupid.” Techie forces a laugh and stares down at his plate. He forks some fish into his mouth and chews, disliking the texture. Under the table, Matt’s feet press more tightly against his. 

“We could wait until morning,” Matt says. “If you don’t want to go out tonight.” 

“I just. Yeah, you said it gets cold and I, I’d really like to, to um. To fuck, if you want to? And then sleep, if that’s okay?” 

Matt grins. “That’s okay,” he says, and he finishes the remainder of his fish in one bite. 

Techie knows about washing dishes, at least: he got plenty of practice in the orphanage, where the only service droids they had were two terrifying security bots who worked as hard to keep the children in as they did to keep anyone who might have hurt them out. He banishes his bad memories as best he can as he helps Matt clean up after dinner, shivering a bit when a chilly wind blows in through the windows. Matt rolls the windows halfway shut before joining Techie in bed, and this feels like a good compromise, though Techie still worries about flyhoppers invading their room during the night. He pulls the blankets up to his chin when he hears one of the stormtroopers laughing outside. He’s naked underneath, watching Matt undress in the light from the other moon, which is still bright enough to keep Techie’s night vision from clicking back on. Matt goes to the washroom, and Techie dearly hopes he won’t return with a jar of homemade lube harvested from some kind of plant in the woods or slime from the lake. 

Matt brushes his teeth, and when he comes back Techie is relieved to see that he’s carrying their usual bottle of All-Purpose Personal Lubricant from the _Finalizer_ commissary. They use an average of one bottle per month, and Matt has threatened to kick the ass of several lieutenants at the commissary counter who have remarked upon this.  

Techie begins to sincerely appreciate the moonlight when Matt stands washed in it, wearing only his glasses. The miracle of Matt mostly has to do with his heart and his patience, his kindness, but Techie remains in awe of his physical form all the same, still in a certain amount of disbelief that he’s allowed to touch Matt, never mind the fact that Matt is always ready and willing to put his tongue anywhere Techie wants it, which is everywhere. At the moment Matt is breathing a little heavily, getting a little hard, and he seems emotional or something. Techie fidgets under the blanket, enjoying the feeling of hiding from the cool air beneath it. 

“What if this was our house?” Matt asks. He sets the lubricant on the side table and sits on the bed, staring down at Techie like this is a real question. 

“Uh,” Techie says. “That would be okay, I guess. But-- I don’t know.” 

“I’d fish or hunt for you every day.” 

“Okay.” Techie knows what he means, but that phrasing sounds weird, like Matt would be hunting Techie himself, or casting a line into the lake in hopes of catching him. “Do you want to get in?” 

Techie peels back the blanket, allowing the cold air to brush along his bare skin. This makes the feeling of Matt’s warmth settling against him all that much better, and Techie clings to the sensation, moaning and burying as much of himself against Matt as he can. Matt presses him back down to the pillow and kisses him until they’re both hard and laughing a little. 

“I just love you so much,” Matt says, mumbling this against Techie’s mouth. He seems sad about something. Techie removes Matt’s glasses and sets them on the table by the bed. 

“I know,” Techie whispers, holding Matt’s face in both his hands. The marks left by the goggles he wore while working are still faintly visible, and Techie brushes his thumbs over them. “I love you, too. Want you inside me--”

“I just want to give you everything,” Matt says, again a little forcefully. He exhales through his nose and reaches for the lube. “You know?” he says, turning that sad look on Techie again.

“I know, yeah, me too, I know--” Techie chews his lip, lifts his hips. “Can you give me your cock, then, please?” 

Matt laughs, and the strange mood seems to dissipate. Techie whines when Matt fingers him open, wanting more and wanting it now. He sucks on his own fingers and lets Matt feel him clenching around his touch, begging. 

“Look at you,” Matt says, for maybe the third time, reverent and soft. “Fuck, look at you. You’re fucking beautiful.”

Techie laughs around his fingers and then resumes sucking on them. He hitches his hips and blinks his hideous eyes at Matt as if to offer evidence to the contrary. At least they’re not infected anymore. After much coaching, Matt finally got him to report to medbay and have the itchy irritation he’d tolerated for years examined. All it took to fix things was a shot, and he’s got some drops that he’s supposed to use twice a day, packed in his bag. Most of the time he remembers, but today he managed to forget. 

When Matt finally pushes in, Techie has no patience left, or shame. He grabs Matt’s hips and tugs him forward, moaning as he arches into the feeling of being filled. Only afterward does he consider that the stormtroopers certainly heard that, but as Matt bottoms out inside him he barely cares. He was so desperate for this, before Matt. He enjoys all kinds of holoporn, but penetration has been his main thing ever since he saw his first close up video of an ass being breached by a naked cockhead. For years he tried various things in attempt to capture the feeling: bottles of various sizes, always either too big to get very far or too narrow to feel any better than three fingers did, the handle of a hairbrush that became too boringly familiar, even a pickle he’d stolen from the mess, though he lost his nerve with that after a few inches, too afraid it would slip out of his grip and get stuck up there, requiring a trip to medbay that he probably never would have taken, preferring to die of pickle insertion. He’d long given up on finding an actual person to trust enough to penetrate him by the time Matt sauntered into his room and announced that he was moving in. 

And now he has Matt, whose cock and lips and chest and arms are perfect-- Also his hair, his pretty eyes, big hands, broad shoulders. His thighs, too, bracketed around Techie now, holding him in place. Techie shivers underneath him, delirious with relief at the feeling of being so full, so protected, so warm under Matt on the bed. Sometimes he guiltily imagines that he went through all thirty-two tortuous years before Matt just to earn this: a person who is too good to be true but so solid and real and so deep inside him now.

“Stay in me all night,” Techie says, murmuring this against Matt’s open mouth. “Mhmm, please, please-- Feels so good.” 

“You want me to fall asleep inside you?” Matt asks. “Leave you plugged up with my come?” 

“Nhn, yes!” 

This idea sounds less wonderful after they’ve both finished, and Techie gently eases out from under Matt in mid-kiss, Matt’s spent cock slopping out with a wet gush of come that makes Techie somewhat concerned for the stormtroopers’ mattress. He goes into the washroom to clean up while Matt dozes, and brings back a towel for the wet spot. 

“Come here,” Matt says, as if Techie would consider going anyplace else right now.

Techie hurries to burrow back into the heat of Matt’s arms under the blankets. He grins against Matt’s lips and then opens for more kissing, feeling very tired and ready for their usual nightly routine. When he feels himself slipping close to sleep he scoots down to rest his cheek against Matt’s chest, where he can best feel the rumble of his voice when he speaks. Nightmares still come, but being soothed into sleep like this keeps them mild enough not to ruin an otherwise pleasant evening, most of the time. 

“Tomorrow’s gonna be awesome,” Matt says, stroking Techie’s hair. “I’ll wake you up at dawn. It’s easy, with the birds. You don’t even need an alarm. I’m ahead of schedule on the repairs, so we can walk all the way to the lake. And there’s a cliff just a little ways from there, it looks down into this fucking amazing canyon, and there are wildflowers--”

“Canyon?” Techie goes tense. “What, why-- Why is it amazing, um, isn’t a cliff just like, like-- A big dropoff over rocks?” 

“No, it’s more than that, there are all these color striations in the rock, it looks like a painting.” 

“Oh-- Oh, that’s. Sounds good, I guess--” 

“And I’m gonna finish up early tomorrow so we can go for a walk at sundown, too, so you can see the sunset from the edge of the canyon. Or maybe the lake, it reflects off the water, makes me want to go running in and like, rub the colors all over my face, and it sparkles--” 

“Matt?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Could, you-- Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m so stupid--”

“You’re not.” Matt tucks him in more tightly, kisses his temple. “What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing! Nothing, just-- Could you, like-- I know you’re excited about all this, this stuff, and I’ll try it, I will, but since we’re going to bed, um, and I’m feeling a little, a little wound up, because it’s all so new-- Could you just talk about our room? Like, describe our room back on the ship? I know it’s fucking stupid--” 

“It’s not stupid, fuck, I’m sorry.” Matt pulls the blankets up higher, settling them over Techie’s trembling shoulder. “I’m the one being a dumbass.”

“No! No, you’re not, I like it when you-- You get excited about things, it’s good, it’s-- I just, since it’s nighttime, maybe--” 

“The room back on the ship,” Matt says, and Techie shrinks down against him more completely, clinging. “Our room. Well. It’s got the two beds, and your workstation, and all your little figures. It’s nice and dark and there are no windows. The vents make that humming sound, and your workstation hums, too. It’s peaceful, like a non-noise, but it’s better than total silence. Did you notice the machines downstairs here? They hum like crazy, you can hear it from up here when the bugs are quiet.”

“I did hear it.” Techie squirms closer, smiling against Matt’s chest and listening to his heartbeat. “Thank you,” he whispers, barely audible. 

“You want me to keep going?”

“Yes, please. Sorry--” 

“The bedsheets are just like these ones,” Matt says, soothing his hand over the back of Techie’s head. He doesn’t need to say it anymore: _don’t be sorry, stop apologizing, it’s okay_. Techie can feel it in his touch now. “And all your blankets are there. Our blankets, I mean. And your stockpile of Health Crunch for when you work through breakfast.” 

Techie grins, eyes closed, his fingertips moving on Matt’s back in soft circles of appreciation. He’ll try tomorrow, he really will: on the walk and at the lake and maybe even near this canyon cliff that sounds like hell to him. But it’s what Matt loves, and for Matt he can face his ridiculous, nonstop fears. It’s the least he can do, in exchange for all Matt does for him. 

When he wakes up, kneeing Matt in the thigh as a full-body jerk of terror startles him out of his dream about falling off a cliff inside the _Finalizer_ and down into a bottomless, panel-lined chasm, he’s only confused about where he is until he hears Matt’s voice again. 

“I’ve got you,” Matt says, as if he caught Techie before he could fall too far. “Got you, you’re okay.” 

“Mmph,” Techie says, nodding in sleepy acknowledgement. His heart is still beating fast, but his eyes are too heavy to keep open, and soon he’s asleep against Matt’s chest again, tracking the distant thud of his heartbeat through better dreams. 

As promised, there are birds in the morning, and their songs are far less distressing than the bugs and things that made noise in the night. It helps that Matt is leaning up over him in the pale bluish light that sneaks in through the half-open windows, kissing Techie’s cheeks as he whispers him awake. 

“It’s morning,” Matt says. He sucks at Techie’s earlobe and lets him writhe in a lazy protest of consciousness. Matt is better at getting up on time, even back on the ship. Techie used to lurch out of bed with a kind of relief when it was time to give up on peaceful sleep, but now he lingers and wrings out extra minutes when he can, holding Matt under the blankets with him. 

“Good morning,” Techie says. His voice is scratchy and the air outside the bed feels cool. Matt kisses him on the lips, then deeply, and Techie moans at the thought of his bad breath but allows it anyway. 

“Want to eat something before we go walking?” Matt asks. “Or I could make tea.” 

“Since when do you drink tea?” Techie’s gut curls up the way it does before tech team meetings, not as painfully as it would if he had to give a report at one, but getting there. 

“The troopers have some dried herbs,” Matt says. “And flower petals. Plus honey, and sugar.”

Techie blinks up at Matt, half-forgetting what they were talking about. He takes a deep breath and remembers his nighttime vow to be a good sport for Matt’s sake, nods. 

“Okay,” Techie says, voice small. “Let’s just-- Let’s just go out, no tea. I don’t want to make you, you know, late, for work.” 

Matt kisses him on the nose. “I hope you brought a sweater.” 

“I did. Do they, um, weird question, but-- Do they have medical supplies here?” 

“You’re not going to get hurt.” Matt catapults over him, landing heavily on the floor beside the bed. He has morning wood, flagging but giving a hopeful twitch when Techie looks him over. “But yeah,” Matt says. “There’s first aid stuff, of course. C’mon, I want you to see the sun rise.” 

“Do we have to go to the cliff?” 

“No. But I bet you’d like it if you gave it a shot. We don’t have to stand near the edge. Don’t you--” Matt shuffles in place, scratches at the back of his head. “Don’t you believe I can keep you safe?” 

“No-- Yes! Yes, of course, of course I do, it’s just that--”

“I know I don’t have a real blaster, but the stun function can knock out a bantha, I think--” 

“It’s not you and it’s not the blaster, it’s me, I’m sorry, I’m-- I’m getting up, I’ll get ready, it’s fine, let’s go.” 

Techie avoids Matt’s eyes as he hurries to his bag and tugs on his clothes, pulling a sweater over his head and fixing his hair with his hands. He gives Matt a wary smile and tugs at the hem of the sweater. 

“We should hurry up, right?” Techie says. “For the, uh, sun. Don’t want to miss it.” 

He walks past Matt, who is still naked, and moves toward the stairs that lead down into the radar room. Matt closed the windows in this room when he packed up for the night, and it’s sweltering hot, but the lack of natural light and the powerful hum of the machinery are comforting. With his night vision mode switched on, Techie examines a few of the panels. He doesn’t often mess with hardware, but there is something appealing about working with his hands. Like sex, it burns off a certain kind of anxiety. It’s why he’s always liked making figures with wire. They’re nonfunctional and unbeautiful, not particularly creative or even varied, but he gets satisfaction from twisting them into shapes and adding them to his collection, if it can be called a collection and not just clutter. He misses the sight of them, a little. For a long time they were his only friends, and sometimes he still thinks about the ones he left behind in his old monitoring station in Ma-Ma’s fortress. He doesn’t like trying to imagine what happened to them: nothing good, surely, but it’s dumb to worry about. It’s not like they’re people, like the kids from the orphanage who weren’t real friends either and who are scattered all over the galaxy now, or dead. 

“I didn’t touch anything!” he says, jumping away from the radar column when he hears Matt on the stairs behind him. “I mean, I wasn’t, wasn’t trying to, I was just looking--” 

“Babe, it’s fine,” Matt says. He’s wearing a jacket over his uniform, and it almost looks like normal clothing that a civilian might go walking in. “I was gonna ask you to look at this anyway,” he says. “There might be some kind of shortcut. I’ve been activating the system upgrades in individual band sensors, one at a time. I was thinking--”

“I could write a program that would make the change system-wide,” Techie says, nodding rapidly. “Yeah, sure, I bet I could, I’d just have to look at the code--”

“After we walk around a little,” Matt says. His hand comes to the small of Techie’s back, gentle but firm. Techie appreciates this, though he also wants to fight against it at times. It was Matt’s steady encouragement that got him to face his fear of medbay, which has made his eyes feel a thousand times better. Maybe sunlight will do something for other ailments. “C’mon, it’s fucking blistering in here,” Matt says. “Help me open the windows. By the time we get back it will have cooled down some.” 

Techie goes to one of the windows while Matt opens the ones on the other side of the room. It’s a simple pulley system, and though his heart is beating fast, it doesn’t feel altogether bad to let the cool, glowing light of dawn wash over him as he blinks against it. He takes a deep breath, realizing only halfway through his inhale that he’s sucking in fresh air along with his usual attempt to draw some comfort into his lungs. He exhales and smiles at Matt when he comes to stand beside him, all the other windows open now, too. 

“Ready,” Techie says, though Matt didn’t ask. 

Techie has learned to take a certain amount of pride in conquering his fears, and he tries to harness it as he marches outside, past the stormtroopers. They’re making a campfire to cook their breakfast, and though they give Techie an unfriendly look as he passes, he waves as if he’s oblivious to their resentment.

“This way,” Matt says. He takes Techie’s elbow steers him in the other direction, away from the clearing where his shuttle landed yesterday. 

“Sorry.” Techie keeps close, his shoulder bumping Matt’s. He’s glad to leave the judgmental stares of the stormtroopers behind, but there’s a massive forest in the distance that makes the trees near the radar station seem sparse and non-threatening, and they seem to be headed toward it. Just the feeling of walking through an atmosphere without walls is jarring, and the wind borders on cold even as the sky just begins to grow lighter. “Oh,” Techie says, squinting to override the magno-vision function that attempts to kick in. “I think I see the lake.” 

“Yep, that’s it.” Matt takes Techie’s hand and walks a little faster. He’s smiling just at the corner of his mouth, the wind ruffling his curls. “Fuck, this feels good,” he says. 

“The, uh, the fresh air?” 

“Yeah, just being outdoors. With you.” 

Techie squeezes Matt’s hand and takes in their surroundings with cautious interest, noticing some tiny flowers peeking up here and there in the weedy grass along the trail that leads toward the lake. It’s a small footpath, just a faint line presumably worn into the earth by the stormtroopers who live here. The barely-lit sky is streaked with thin clouds, the planet they’re orbiting watching them from a distance as its sun begins to peek along the edges of the horizon, through up beams of pale light. The breeze seems to get colder as they move toward the lake, and Matt tucks his arm around Techie, sheltering him from it.

“I sat right there and watched the sun come up after my first day here,” Matt says, indicating a smooth outcropping of exposed rock near the edge of the lake. “I was thinking about you,” he says, when Techie stops walking and looks up at him. “Wishing you were here with me.”

“Well, now I am.” Techie is shivering, clutching. He rests his cheek against Matt’s shoulder and peers out at the lake, distrusting the size of it but otherwise feeling calm enough. He can see the far shore from where they’re standing, but it’s distant, and the way the cool wind ripples over the surface of the water seems menacing, though also so beautiful that it’s hard to look away from. 

Techie grins when he realizes what this reminds him of: Matt himself, during their first encounter. Maybe he didn’t find Matt beautiful, exactly, but the reality of him was as magnetic as the threat of who he might have turned out to be was repellant, and by the time Techie saw Matt in his underwear beautiful seemed like a vast understatement. 

After considering how much this place is like Matt himself, a kind of reflection of his gentle power, Techie is able to appreciate the sunrise and everything else about their surroundings, especially when he’s sitting between Matt’s legs, both of them protected from the wind by the rock outcropping that Matt leans back against. Techie fidgets a little within the circle of Matt’s arms, though he’s already comfortable. It’s just a habit he has when he experiences a kind of happiness that still feels alien, building and building inside his chest, looking for someplace to go. Matt is used to it by now and remains still behind him, sneaking his thumb inside the sleeve of Techie’s sweater to rub it over the thin skin on the underside of his wrist. 

“Oh,” Techie says when the sun is high enough to make him squint, his eyes whirring with soft confusion like baby animals. “I can feel it.” 

“The sun? Yeah, it gets warmer quick.” 

Matt kisses his cheek and squeezes him closer. Techie’s eyes don’t have an auto-shade feature for extreme light, and he was afraid that exposure to any direct sunlight would make him feel the way he did during his auction day, but this is nothing like that. He closes his eyes against the glow of the sun and concentrates on processing the feeling of the soft heat on his cheeks, Matt’s steady breathing against his back and contented little sighs lulling him into a near nap as he does.

“Shit,” Matt says, breaking him from his reverie. “I was going to fish. Forgot to bring the rod.” 

“I’d be fine with more mushrooms,” Techie says. The mention of a rod makes him remember the stun-only blaster Matt was issued, and he reaches back, his hands trailing up under Matt’s jacket and along his belt until he feels the shape of it. He gasps, stupidly-- He knew it would be there, but there’s still something shocking about the texture of it.

“It’s crazy to have a weapon again,” Matt says, shifting behind him. 

“Crazy-- Good?”

“Not really. But not bad. Do you want to walk through the woods?”

“Oh-- Okay.” Techie didn’t expect to want to, but he’s riding the high of having conquered the edge of the lake, and even when his traitorous mind tries to trick him into thinking otherwise, he knows Matt wouldn’t bring him to a place where he won’t be safe. 

They move toward the woods, holding hands. Matt insists that it’s okay, that he doesn’t need to hurry back to work. Techie isn’t sure if that’s true or just something Matt has decided for himself. He can be a bit of a rule breaker. Sometimes late at night he talks about hating the Order, and when he’s really worked up he talks about leaving the Order. Techie wants to understand. He tries, the way Matt tries to understand his paranoia and skittishness and general pathetic loser mentality. Matt would have been a winner, were it not for the Order shackling him at a young age. Techie understands that much, so he gets why Matt longs for the chance to succeed outside of the Order’s restraints.

Techie can understand that, but he can’t relate. He would be chattel again without the Order, adrift and hopelessly vulnerable, probably dead within days. 

The woods aren’t as dark as Techie feared they would be, even under the thickest part of the canopy. They’re dappled with warm light that cuts in through the leaves and the tree trunks, and there are skittering and tweeting noises overhead, but they seem very small compared to Matt’s presence at his side. 

“Are you sure we don’t need to turn back?” Techie asks when they’ve walked for a while, Matt pausing here and there to collect mushrooms in the pockets of his jacket. 

“Nah, no hurry,” Matt says. He’s like a boy avoiding his lessons: his cheeks are bright. “You’ll write a program that will have the rest of the work done in a few minutes, probably.” 

“Maybe, but-- I’m not sure, I’d have to look at the code--”

“You’re a brilliant coder, I know you can do it. C’mon, the canyon’s just up ahead.” 

Techie swallows a noise that Matt probably would have interpreted as distrust of his protective abilities. He’s not even sure what he’s afraid of; he normally doesn’t have a problem with heights. Maybe it’s just the idea of confronting something as huge as a canyon. Massive things often make him nervous, as much as he salivates over that quality in men. 

“There,” Matt says as they clear the tree line. He’s beaming now, the sun bouncing off his glasses with a glare that makes Techie’s eyes fuzz over with confusion for a moment. When he blinks them back into order, he’s looking at the canyon. 

Techie supposes he saw it when they were approaching the edge of the woods, but he didn’t really process it as a chasm in the moon’s surface. It had looked like a kind of sky, part of the sunrise somehow. He takes a deep breath and tries to process what he’s looking at as Matt tucks an arm around him. The color striations he mentioned do look beautiful in the fresh daylight, and there are some birds soaring over the far edge of the canyon wall, green things growing here and there. It’s nice, Techie supposes, but-- Boring? 

“Wow,” he says when Matt looks at him expectantly. “That’s, like-- so awesome!” 

Matt laughs and gives him a one-armed hug. “It makes me want to grow wings,” he says.

“Heh,” Techie says, not sure how to otherwise respond to that. 

While his canyon encounter seems like an anticlimax, as they head back through the woods Techie notices that he feels lighter on his feet, and breathing seems easier. He’s no longer clinging to Matt’s arm as they walk, just loosely holding his hand while he uses his other hand to point at things and ask what they’re called. Matt tells him the names for these things on his home planet, and it’s like they’re strolling through his memories. Techie is glad to keep him company there, and in the present moment as well, comfortable now in the drift between the two that this place represents for Matt. He’s in such a good mood when they return to the radar tower that he smiles at the stormtroopers. 

Techie joins Matt in the radar room and stretches out on his stomach on the floor, clicking away on his data pad after uploading the radar station OS code. Matt tinkers with efficiency upgrades, suspending the radar band work under the assumption that Techie will write a program that makes it redundant. It’s the kind of thing that would make Techie shaky with terror, if anyone but Matt placed this kind of faith in him. But Matt’s trust is different, special-- not conditional. Techie is sweating by the time he finishes his auto upgrade code, and he tugs his t-shirt off, exposing his skinny, fish-white chest.

“Finished,” he says when Matt looks up at him. 

Matt grins. “Already? Sweet.” 

“Yeah, it’s-- It’s pretty sweet, check this out.” 

Techie laughs when Matt barrels toward him at full speed and gives him a celebratory, tackling hug. They’re both slippery with sweat, and the scent of Matt’s makes Techie a little hard while he shows him how the code works. Maybe showing off the code makes him a little hard, too.  

“You’re brilliant,” Matt says, peeling Techie’s pants off. “You’re wasted on the Order.” 

“I am not,” Techie says, trying not to be alarmed by that. He’d rather have sex than start worrying about what Matt means, and it seems like they’re headed in that direction, overheated room and all. “I-- I do my best work with you, really.” 

“Your best work?” Matt grins, the dark underbelly of his rage toward the Order seeming to fade from his eyes. 

“Yeah,” Techie says, pushing Matt back onto his ass. “Like this, for example.” 

He ends up blowing Matt down in the radar room, swallowing his come while Matt curses and grunts, hopefully leading the stormtroopers outside to believe he’s frustrated with his work and not coming down his boyfriend’s throat. They go upstairs to continue, and Techie laughs at the feeling of climbing a staircase while sporting an aching erection, something he never thought he would experience. In the interest of having more new experiences, he asks Matt to fuck him over the little table in the dining room. He’s sometimes fantasized about Matt having him in the mess, about letting everyone there see just how well he takes Matt’s huge cock. It’s a nightmare scenario that somehow gets him off when it’s pure fantasy. 

“Now we can do whatever we want for the rest of the day,” Matt says when they’re slumped in the bed together, naked and panting, still very sweaty. “We could go swimming, even.” 

“I don’t know how--” 

“I could teach you. Or we could just wade in the shallow end.” 

“Matt, I-- I’m sorry, but I think I’m kind of, like, afraid of fish?” 

Matt laughs, and Techie is too floaty and blissed out to get his feelings hurt. He grins and punches Matt’s shoulder in fake protest. 

“They’re weird!” Techie says, sitting up to sweep his sweat-damp hair back. “No offense. I know you love them.” 

The rest of the day in the little apartment is perfect, as far as Techie is concerned. They can’t actually wander outside without tipping off the troopers that the job is finished, and neither of them is ready to go back to the _Finalizer_ and their usual routine just yet. Techie worships Matt’s body in various ways between short, wonderfully dreamless naps. In the shower, he gets on his knees and buries his face against the hard muscle of Matt’s stomach, laving his tongue over Matt’s wet skin, then grazing it with his teeth. In bed he straddles Matt’s back and rubs his shoulders, snickering when Matt moans and humps himself against the mattress. He rides Matt’s cock slow enough to make it last for far longer than they usually go, and is rewarded with a rare whimper from Matt when he finally lets himself come.

They dress just before sundown and walk back to the lake. Matt was right about the way dying light dances over the surface, rich and golden and in constant flickering motion. Techie walks right up to the water and tests it with his fingers, feeling brave. 

“I forgot what this was like,” Matt says. Techie turns toward him, afraid that he hears something unfamiliar in Matt’s voice. His heart sinks when he sees that he was right: Matt is tearing up, pressing his lips together and struggling to regain his composure. 

“Forgot-- What, ah, what was like, what do you mean?”

“Normal life things.” Matt lifts his glasses and rubs his eyes dry with his sleeve. “Just, fucking. Breathing real air.” 

“We have real air on the ship--”

“Techie.” Matt walks forward, looking very serious. He takes both of Techie’s hands and holds them against his chest. He’s not crying anymore, but the intensity of his expression is almost worse than tears. Techie’s eyes whir as he forces himself not to look away. “Listen. I didn’t want to-- I wasn’t sure-- I don’t want to scare you.” 

“Okay?” Techie says, his heart rate skyrocketing. He wants to add: then don’t?

“But I think this might be our only chance,” Matt says. 

“Only chance to, to do what?”

Matt looks over his shoulder. When he looks back, Techie knows what he’ll say.

“To leave the Order.” 

Techie forces out a nervous laugh. He’s not surprised when Matt’s grave expression doesn’t falter. 

“I’m serious,” Matt says, lowering his voice. “There’s a transport hidden under the tower. I saw it in the blueprints when I was studying for this job. And there are only two troopers. If we stun one while the other is on rest cycle--”

“ _Stun_ one? With the, with the _blaster_? You want to attack the Order’s troops?”

“I don’t want to do any of this anymore, but it’s a way to get free. You and I, we’d do great away from all this shit. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met, and smart as fuck--” 

“Away, wait-- Away where? Matt, it’s too, you can’t--”

“You can’t, you can’t, it’s not allowed-- That’s them talking! Do you know how close they are to finishing Starkiller? In a year or two it will be operational. Everyone’s saying it’s like the Deathstar times ten. Even on our little planet, when I was growing up, there were stories about the Deathstar. We were afraid, that’s why we did what the Order wanted when they showed up. Every time I do their fucking radar repair I think about how I’m helping them get closer to blowing up more planets. More places like this, just to show they can.” 

“You don’t-- you don’t know, it might not be, ah, what-- That is, the weapon, it could be, could be something else--” 

“Whatever it is, I’m sick of living in its shadow. Aren’t you? These people _bought_ you. That’s how they see us, as their possessions. Only as good as what we can do for them.” 

“Yeah, but-- But they--”

Techie loses the ability to speak then, and he falls into the hug Matt gives him, hides his face against Matt’s throat and tries to stop shaking. Matt strokes his hair and whispers that it’s okay, that he’s sorry, never mind, forget it. As if it’s that easy for him to give up his dream, just because Techie is scared of this like he’s scared of fish and fresh air and medbay, communal showers, suns-- Everything. 

“Okay,” Techie whispers, his eyes pinched shut against Matt’s skin, just over his pounding pulse. 

“Okay?” Matt’s shoulders flinch. “What. What do you mean?” 

“I mean, I-- I always, ah, I’ve known you want to leave the Order for a long time and I always assumed I’d go with you, I mean, of course I will, and of course I’m fucking scared, but. But--”

He won’t say the rest out loud. _But I’m more afraid that you’ll grow to hate me if I keep you anchored to the Order_. 

“Just tell me the plan,” Techie says, blinking rapidly and already thinking about his eye drops. Where will he get new packets, if not the commissary on the _Finalizer_? What if Matt’s glasses break? Who would replace them?

“You’re shaking,” Matt says, squeezing his shoulders.

“Of course I’m sh-shaking! This is like, completely insane, and you just sprung it on me out of no, no-- no-fucking-where--”

“I know, I’m sorry, I wanted to wait and see if you’d even be happy here, to see if you’d be okay--” 

“I’m happy wherever you are,” Techie says-- firmly, almost angry, though he’s not even sure this is strictly true. All he knows is that his potential for happiness would be eliminated entirely if he lost Matt, and especially if he still technically had Matt with him while the loss of his affection wore Techie back down to nothing.

Matt needs this freedom. He needs canyons and lakes and fish and sunlight. Techie knew this was coming. He just didn’t realize it would get here so soon. 

“Kylo Ren once told me that you’re the strongest person he’d ever met,” Matt says. He’s breathing hard, seems serious. 

“What?” Techie has never met Kylo Ren, for starters, unless sharing a very uncomfortable lift ride counts. 

Matt kisses Techie’s forehead instead of explaining. “We’re going to do this,” he says when he pulls back, his eyes bright with hope as the last of the sunlight fades. “It’s going to work. I knew it when I saw you write that code. You can do anything.” 

Techie would like to point out that writing some basic system upgrade code doesn’t exactly equate to pulling off a lunatic escape from the galaxy’s most heavily weaponized regime, but he swallows that down. Matt will back away from this if Techie reveals how bottomless his terror is, and if it really is their only chance, which seems likely, Techie’s got to take it or risk having Matt always hereafter look at him and think, _I could have had the life I wanted if I wasn’t in love with such a pathetic basket case_. 

“Tell me the plan,” Techie says, trying to make his posture match his fake confidence. “And let’s, let’s-- Let’s do it. Let’s go.”

 

 

**


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, sorry to take so long to update, secondly this got pretty long so I'm splitting the conclusion into two parts and there will be another chapter after this one! I'll probably finish it by Tuesday night, just wanted to go ahead and post this part since it's a 17k chapter and it's been a long wait already. Thanks to all who encouraged me on this one! <3
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>  **PLEASE NOTE** the new tags I added! Non-consensual mind reading (it's somewhat traumatic for Techie) and Implied/Referenced Torture (Techie remembers his past torture vividly at moments)
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> **

Ren doesn’t make a habit of watching Hux sleep, but he finds himself doing it now and again. He’s decided that it’s a practical indulgence. Allowing Hux to witness any sort of admiration makes him preen and incorrectly assume that he holds significant power over Ren. If Ren reserves intense observation only for when Hux is asleep, Hux can’t take any liberties or make fun of him for staring. 

Though their routine is regular, familiar, Hux still seems like a mysterious creature when his face is slack and soft with his sleep, his sex-mussed hair hanging over his forehead. Even the tools available through the Force can’t fully expose a person in the complete way that Ren sometimes wants to know Hux. Sex can’t do that either, or the muttered conversations they sometimes have late at night, in the dark, touching each other with only fingertips under the blankets as if afraid to break some spell. Even that is not enough to chase the shadows from Hux’s every corner, and Ren suspects an entire lifetime of nightly whispering after raucous fucks still wouldn’t expose every inch of Hux that might be glimpsed.

Ren longs to see all of Hux laid out like a schematic or a star chart, and not only because he’s grudgingly fascinated by Hux’s personal habits and the dark disorder that lurks under his pressed uniforms. He wants to see if there are traps for him waiting within Hux, snares and catches beyond the usual dangers of attachment. It would be a relief to read every measurement of Hux’s intentions and find nothing that will surprise him, and yet the thought of having all of that information spread out in front of him is also dispiriting, in a less rational way. The edges of unpredictability that are threaded through Hux like seductive whispers are what drew Ren to him in the first place and what keep him coming back here night after night, straining to hear the incantations that seem to move through Hux’s skin and bones, blood and breath, and into the gold strands that Ren can pick out in Hux’s hair on the rare occasions when they’re together while sunlight touches it. 

He's musing in this mood, during the deepest calm of Hux’s slumber, when the emergency signal blares from Hux’s comm unit on the bedside table. 

Hux bolts upright, almost cracking his skull against Ren’s, and rolls toward the comm like it’s a blaster he’ll need to use on an intruder who’s just fired on him. Even as someone who has also trained himself to snap out of a dead sleep when necessary, Ren is perturbed by what feels like a complete shift in reality. Part of Hux’s mystery is that he can be rather droid-like when duty calls, even if he’s still got Ren’s come crusted on his thighs, such as now. 

“Report,” Hux barks into his comm, his scratchy voice at least evincing the fact that he was asleep two seconds ago. 

“Security breach, sir.” 

The reporting officer sounds like Mitaka. Ren is pretending to have just awakened himself, faking a yawn and rubbing at his eyes. 

Hux has already leapt out of bed. “What sort of breach?” 

“Current analysis suggests it’s minor in scale, but the circumstances are such that I thought you should be alerted at once. A small transport originating on Jungka made an unauthorized launch. We intercepted the two technicians aboard before they could make a hyperspace leap. There was evidence of subterfuge, an attempt to scramble signals and use unauthorized cloaking override, and the two aboard were not cleared for use of the transport. They seem to have attacked the troopers who were assigned to protect them on Jungka, but only with stun blasts. The techs are in the brig now, awaiting questioning. One resisted arrest and broke a stormtrooper’s nose.” 

“Fuck,” Ren mutters when he realizes they’re talking about Matt and the other tech. The red-haired tech. The aberration. 

“Further,” says the voice on the comm, “One of the techs is involved with ship-wide security programming. Commander Vine thought you might want to personally be present for his questioning, therefore.” 

“You’re bloody right I do.” 

Hux is seething. Ren has never heard him curse while on duty before, not even on an unscheduled comm call. Hux tells the reporting officer he’ll come to the brig at once and turns on Ren with a look of hellfire. 

“What?” Not for the first time, Ren is very glad Hux can’t use the Force. Ren’s heart is pounding, but he’s doing a good job of looking just mildly irritated by this interruption. 

“Did you know?” Hux asks, walking closer. He looks like he wants to murder someone, and Ren is sitting right here. 

“Know what?” 

“That these two techs-- That their special request for a romantic jaunt during the radar repair tech’s assignment was actually an escape attempt?” 

“How would I have known that?” Ren is sincerely angry about the accusation, glowering. He knows other things, or parts of them, but had no idea about this. 

“Because that radar tech is your little gym buddy, and because I shared my feelings of hesitation to approve the other one’s leave request with you and were glib, you completely dismissed me! And you’re the one who can _sense_ these things, fucking supposedly.”

“You can’t blame me for not anticipating everything that goes wrong with your staff.” 

“But I asked you about this!” 

“And I was wrong, okay, fine! But this isn’t some plot against you.” 

“Except in the sense that you didn’t really acknowledge my concern, you just brushed it aside because you wanted to fuck!” 

Hux is dressing while he berates Ren, though his thighs are still laced with come residue. Ren is caught between seething at this accusation and scrambling to think of anything that would prevent Hux from going to interview that red-haired tech with the synthetic eyes. Hux’s current meltdown will have nothing on the one that’s forthcoming. 

“You’re barely awake,” Ren says. “So I won’t hold this against you later.” 

Hux looks up from buttoning his pants, snarling. “Hold what against me?” 

“This attitude, like you think I sabotaged you on purpose.” 

“That isn’t what I said. Never mind, I can’t deal with your pouting right now. I have work to do.”

Ren almost protests that he does, too. He works just as hard as Hux if not more so. Hux only thinks he knows what it means to truly labor under the burdens placed upon a person by destiny. 

But Hux’s destiny may be more complex than either of them expected. Ren still hasn’t worked out exactly where the red-haired tech came from or why he’s here now. He only knows that he’s been dreading this moment since he once shared a lift with the man. 

“Want me to come?” Ren asks when Hux heads toward the front door of his quarters, shrugging his greatcoat over his shoulder as he goes.

Hux pauses and looks back toward the bed. “What for?”  

“Interrogation is kind of my thing.” 

“So put some clothes on and get moving!” 

Ren sighs and slides out of the bed in an unhurried lurch, letting Hux get a headstart. It won’t take long for Hux to realize at least some of what’s going on, once he sees that tech in person and looks at him closely. Perhaps he’ll even _feel_ something when they’re in the same room together, though Kylo has met literal rocks that are more Force sensitive than Hux. That tech doesn’t strictly resemble Hux at first glance, because of the eyes, their completely different countenances, and the tech’s tendency to shrink away from anyone who looks at him as if he can turn himself into a shadow. Even the shade of hair seems slightly different, because the tech lets his hang limply while Hux gels his back into a darkened shine. But there’s no denying they came from the same place, whether by cloning or birth. Ren felt it as sharply as he’s ever felt anything about Hux. 

By the time Ren dresses and reaches the interrogation chamber, Hux will be white-faced with shock, stammering and needing Ren’s support. At least now he’ll learn what it’s like to have traitorous rebel scum in his family. He’s never been very understanding about that. 

**

It’s been years since Techie’s panic became so piercing and intense that he turned the corner into numbness. He hasn’t completely left his body, but he isn’t in control of it, and that’s not true only because he’s locked into an interrogation chair with his hands and feet bound. Even if they released him, he wouldn’t be able to move. He’d crumple to the floor like a doll. 

His thought process is similarly hobbled and ineffective, half-formed blips of panic resurfacing before being drowned with waves of something far graver: defeat, stunned surrender, and a willful denial that this is happening. Despite a lifetime of lessons in where horror comes from and how it lets you settle into place before reemerging, Techie really didn’t expect this. That’s what he keeps falling back onto: that even with all his fears, the obsessive avenues that he sent his imagination down in search of what might always go wrong, there was something that had solidified around all that in a way that felt unbreakable. 

Matt. That was what had felt unbreakable. Not even Matt’s love for him but Matt himself. As long as Matt was there-- But now they’ve broken him open, broken through him, and he’s elsewhere, bleeding. Techie flinches in his restraints. There are footsteps, voices out in the hallway that echo as if Techie is underwater and the voices are on shore.

His eyes are a mess. The lighting in the interrogation room is strange, with sections in shadow and panels flashing on the wall. He keeps shifting between night vision and regular mode, wanting to blink all of this way, to wake up from the nightmare. 

His mind tilts toward reason and retreats. What has happened cannot be processed. None of his caution or concern prepared him for the reality of returning to utter horror: the interlude with Matt stripped him of all his most primal, vital defense mechanisms, and now he’s broken, too, unable to even muster a new fear of what comes next. There is no next: Matt is gone. They were caught. There will be torture before death. That might rouse him from this blanked out slumber within his twitching, sweating body, but it won’t return him to himself. What he just lost was everything.

A guard appears. Techie looks down, as if making eye contact might doom him further. Behind the guard, another figure walks into the chamber, this one dressed in black. Techie stares at his boots.

“General,” someone says. “He hasn’t spoken yet, sir.”

“Just as well. Leave us.”

“Yes, sir.”

The black boots remain while the white ones march away. 

“You have committed treason against the First Order,” the black-booted man says. His voice sounds familiar. Someone said _General_ , but that can’t be right. “Do you understand that?” he asks, stepping closer.

Techie flinches. His mouth is so dry. From screaming? No, that was years ago, when they took his eyes. He went silent when they were frozen just before the hyperspace jump. There had been a buzzing in his ears that either came from the ship disabling device or someplace inside Techie’s head.

“Answer me!” The man’s voice is like a slap, pulsing with rage that is only more violent for the audible restraint. “I am still your commanding officer aboard this ship. Your status as a traitor does not negate this.”

Techie tries to nod, but he can only manage to make one of his shoulders jerk.

“Do you have the slightest idea about how much mercy you were shown by the Order you just so flagrantly betrayed? How many special allowances were given to you specifically? The level of trust placed upon you when we gave you access to our security system code? I could kill you myself, for the ingratitude alone.”

The urge to piss floods him with a sudden urgency. Will he ever piss again? Will he die doing it? Like gutter filth, like they used to call him in the gang, like an animal that was taken from a barren wasteland, broken and near useless, and given another chance, only to think he could get more, have better, that he deserved any of it, that he deserved Matt, who might be dead now because Techie was ungrateful, greedy, stupid--

“What is this?” someone says, close to his face.

It’s still the black-booted man speaking: the General, General Hux. But his voice sounds different, suddenly.

“What are-- _What is this_?”

Hux grabs Techie chin and jerks his head up, forcing Techie to look at him. Techie can’t resist: can’t move, has no fight left in him. Never had much to begin with, even before--

Before--

When he had eyes--

When he looked--

“Wha--?” Techie says, trying to ask this of himself more than Hux, or whatever the snarling mirror-image of his past self who claims to be Hux actually is. Certainly this is some delusion, a hallucination. Maybe they’ve already kicked his skull in, maybe this is a last fever dream before death.

Techie’s old green eyes widen as he takes them in, trembling. Hux, or the phantom that sounds like him, sucks in his breath and jerks backward, releasing Techie’s chin and moving away as if he thinks Techie can hurt him now, from within the interrogation chair.

“What--” Hux says. “What-- Are you, who-- How--?”

Techie makes a croaking, wordless noise. The urge to piss is gone, and so is the numbness. He feels like he’s been caught again, but now he has no idea what he did, or how this can be happening. It must be another nightmare. If only the whole thing was, and maybe it is: maybe he’ll wake up back in the radar station, in Matt’s arms, trees swaying in the wind and throwing dappled light in through the windows of the radar station on Jungka. Or maybe he can go back farther and erase that, too, maybe he can wake up before Matt leaves the ship--

“What are you?” Hux asks again, roaring it now and coming forward to grab Techie by his pinned shoulders, snarling in his face.

“I don’t know,” Techie says, or tries to say. His voice isn’t working.

Hux fumbles into the pocket of his greatcoat, his eyes wild and fearful but angry above all. When he pulls out a small knife and flicks it open, Techie freezes, bracing himself for pain.

“You’re a weapon that’s malfunctioned,” Hux says through grit teeth, bringing the knife up toward Techie’s face. “I know that much. And I’m going to find out who made you. From your own broken tongue if that’s what it takes. But first.”

Techie squeezes his eyes shut and hears them whirring as if in protest, like a warning that he can’t hide from what’s about to happen. There’s a deft _swish_ of the blade, but the only pain that comes is a slight tug at his hair. When he opens his eyes, Hux has cut a small section of it away. He’s holding it in his glove, staring at it like it’s an enemy alien that might transform into a tentacle monster at any moment.

Hux turns and leaves without another word, taking the hair with him.

The numbness is gone. Techie is awake inside his panic again, feeling every aching bodily urge that he can’t satisfy: to empty his bladder, to move, to curl into himself and hide his face. To be held in Matt’s arms, to hear his answering heartbeat.

But that will never happen again.

Another figure comes to the open door of the interrogation room. This person is instantly familiar, even within the nightmarish nonsense world that Techie is currently occupying. He’s Kylo Ren, watching the room from behind his mask.

Techie darts his eyes away and still feels Kylo staring at him. He can hear Kylo breathing, and he can feel something invisible but powerful moving over him. It’s a skin-crawling feeling, like a chill and an uncomfortable heat at the same time. 

Then it’s gone, and when Techie looks up again, so is Kylo Ren. The interrogation room’s door slides shut. He’s left alone in his restraints, wanting to scream, afraid to move, sweat that’s gathered on the back of his neck dripping down and tickling over his skin like a taunt, reminding him what’s to come: pain, loss, and certain death that looks like relief on the horizon, from where he’s standing. He can’t start over again. Not without Matt. 

But Hux-- That face. His old face. 

How, how, _how_. 

He pinches his eyes shut, opens them, slams them shut again and hears them whir as if they’re begging for mercy. No matter how many times he does this, he can’t wake up or make sense of any of it beyond the basic facts: they tried to escape the Order, they were caught. Now he’s here, and Matt isn’t. 

Once he reaches that fact his mind whirs backward again, trying to remake reality into something he can handle. Eventually he just pisses himself and hangs limply in the chair, waiting for some kind of confirmation that it’s gone again, all of it: every small thing he had, along with the one thing he’d always wanted. 

 

**

He wakes with a jerk when the door opens again. It’s Hux. He’s got his hat pulled down quite a bit over his forehead, as if he’s trying to hide beneath it. Techie stares at him, heart rate accelerating as he waits to see what Hux will cut off of him this time. He wants to look away, feels like he’s defying the General’s hateful appraisal in a way that will only make what’s about to happen more painful for him, but he can’t even make himself blink. 

They look alike. Techie has had this thought before, but it was a vague observation that seemed unimportant. He’d assumed it was only the rare hair color they share that drew his eye, nothing more complicated than that. Techie’s only striking features beyond his hair are the grotesque eyes and the half-removed brand on his forehead. Hux doesn’t have those, but he has Techie’s nose, his chin, his mouth. Techie feels like all of this has been stolen from him, along with Matt and the freedom that he has never and will never have. 

“An exact match,” Hux says, lifting his chin to look at Techie from under the brim of his hat. His eyes look dark now, shadowed. 

Techie shifts feebly in his restraints. The room smells like stale piss. He’s cold. He wants to disappear without facing whatever comes next, but that’s always been true and it’s a mercy that’s never been granted. Even when Ma-Ma took his eyes, he was awake for most of it. Blacking out seemed to pass by in one ragged indrawn breath, and then there was the pain, the hollowness, the inability to move forward and the fact that he still had to exist without knowing how he possibly could anymore. 

“You’ve been aboard this ship for almost ten years,” Hux says. He’s pacing and avoiding Techie’s eyes now, his hands clasped behind his back. “You were purchased from a slaver on Fleer during a routine mission to collect candidates for our stormtrooper program. The officers who made the decision to bring you aboard for technical labor are currently being questioned. As is your accomplice.” 

“Matt?” Techie says. His voice is a rough croak. Just saying Matt’s name gives him a painful but potent flicker of strength. “He’s-- He, you--” His lip is shaking, and his thighs. His stomach clenches. “He’s alive?”

“For now,” Hux says, rounding on Techie again. “Of course you know the punishment for desertion is public execution.” 

“No-- Please, it was my idea, I made him--!” 

“Don’t worry, you’ll have your punishment, too, once I figure out what you are, who you’re working for and what they sent you here to accomplish. Surely escaping with a fellow tech was only part of what you’ve been plotting all these years. Were you planning to impersonate me? Using my own security system to spy on me, watching my every move to memorize all the details you would have to imitate?”

Hux is losing his composure, eyes flashing with feral rage as he draws closer. Techie shakes his head as hard as he can, knowing he won’t be able to prove that any of these accusations are untrue. The gang that purchased him as a child taught him well that once a leader has suspicions about your motives, those suspicions will be treated as fact. 

“Please,” Techie says, his chest tightening until his throat feels squeezed, too. He has to get the words out, even if they won’t do anything. “Please, he didn’t-- It’s not his fault, you have to-- To spare him, and I’ll, I’ll tell you everything!” 

He’ll make up a story. He’s never been a good liar or particularly creative, but Matt needs him. Anything, he’ll say anything, whatever Hux wants to hear. Anything that will keep Matt safe.

“What’s everything?” Hux asks, still close. Techie can smell his breath: there’s something minty, and a whiff of alcohol that might be medicinal. “Who made you?” Hux shouts, grabbing a handful of Techie’s hair. He tugs Techie’s head back and presses forward, crowding him against the interrogation chair that already barely allows for squirming. “What lab, what faction, what’s the _purpose of this_?”

Techie thinks of fish when he gapes up at the ceiling, mouth open and gasping as he tries to come up with some lie, anything that could save Matt or at least buy them some time until he’s able to form a real story, but what could he say? In no universe could it possibly make sense that he and the General have the same face, or that they did, back when Techie had those green eyes, too. 

“Maybe I don’t need it from your lips,” Hux says. He releases Techie’s hair and steps back, shrugging off his greatcoat. It crumples on the floor like a shed skin. Hux’s hat is pushed up on his forehead now, revealing his entire impossible face. He’s breathing heavily, upper lip twitching with disgust. “I could extract those abominations from their sockets,” he says. “Pry them open and see what you’ve been recording with them. Surely it’s not just my every move. You must have met or otherwise communicated with your co-conspirators at some point. If you’d prefer that sort of investigation of your technology to talking, it can be arranged easily enough.”

He’s talking about Techie’s bionic eyes. About pulling them out. 

The phantom pain snaps across Techie’s face like a snakebite, and he smashes his eyes closed, falling back through time and trying to cower away from the knife that pierced the corner of his eye and then somehow cut deeper. He’d been a fool to think she was only trying to scare him like she always did, that she wouldn’t go through with it, that it had to stop, stop, _stop_ oh please it had to stop, couldn’t happen again, but of course it can, it is happening, will never stop, he’ll be kept alive forever by unnatural means just so he can know this torture over and over--

He’s sobbing, or trying to, when he hears someone speak from the doorway. 

“Hux.” 

Techie recognizes the voice. Kylo Ren. His presence can’t mean anything good. He’s the one who tortures with tools and strength, with the Force. Hux just asks the questions. 

“Let me do it,” Kylo says. There’s a strange, sick gentleness in his tone. As if this is something the two of them enjoy together: breaking people, taking the last of all they have. 

“Why should I?” Hux snaps. “How could this be-- How could this have happened without you sensing something? Am I expected to believe you sensed _nothing_ , all this time? Are you part of whatever he’s doing? Did you _know_?”

“Of course not. Stand back. I’ll get what you need.” 

Hux mutters something under his breath as Kylo approaches the interrogation chair. Techie keeps his eyes closed: protecting them with the feeble shields of his eyelids, which will soon be pulled back by cruel fingers, easily penetrated. There’s no place to hide within this body that has never even belonged to him, not really.

Techie flinches when Kylo’s gloved fingertips brush his cheek, and again when they linger there. His teeth are so tightly clenched that he’s sure they’ll start to break and crack against each other at the first press of the knife to the corner of of his eye. Or maybe Kylo will simply use his fingers to tug the bionic eyes out, snapping them free from the wiring attached to Techie’s brain with pure physical strength. Or with the Force. Techie whimpers when he feels something seeping into him: that crawling chill and nauseating warmth, stroking below his skin and along his bones, up the length of his neck. Into his mind. 

“Relax,” Kylo says. His voice is soft, close. A taunting imitation of something like tenderness. Techie thinks of Matt and sobs dryly again, his shoulders jumping as Kylo finds a foothold in his thoughts and narrows his attention around cloudy memories, sharpening them into focus. 

_I won’t hurt you_ , someone says. It sounds like Kylo Ren, as if he’s standing at the base of Techie’s brain now and whispering this shallow comfort down the long corridor of private places that he’s about to stride through. 

Techie opens his eyes and finds himself back on Fleer, feels its merciless sun on his skin and hot against the top of his head. He screams.

 _Shhhh_ , the voice in his mind whispers. _I just need to look. Fuck, you feel like him. You have his-- Dimensions. His textures._

Techie tries to close his eyes. He can’t tell if he’s been successful in his attempt: he still only sees Fleer, but not the barren lands where the orphanage was or the rancid city where he lived with the gang. This is some place on that planet that he can’t remember laying eyes on, but he knows, suddenly, that he was there. He was born there. When he squirms, he feels helpless in a way that’s different from just being locked into the interrogation chair. This is more complete, a kind of bodiless yet physical containment. Someone squirms beside him in a similar fashion, crying shrilly. He’s warm here, but not safe. 

“Please,” a woman says. Techie knows her; not her name or even her face but the purest pulsing feel of her. He recognizes, with a kind of pitching agony, the way her frantic heartbeat slams against his shoulder. He knows her like he knows the blankets on his bed. 

“Brendol,” she says. “You can’t expect me to--” 

“I don’t expect anything of you and never have. I’d take them both, but I only have supplies aboard for one. You might have told me to plan for two, if you wanted both to survive.” 

“They-- I could feed them, if you brought all three of us, it would save you some supplies--”

“Right, three mouths to feed rather than one, what a boon for my resources that would be. Stop making this difficult. Do you want to make me tear one out of your arms?”

“My father--”

“I don’t care who your father was, you were his bastard just as these are mine! What good did it do you in the end? Hand one over and I’ll raise him like a proper son, in a proper place. I don’t care which it is, but hurry up.” 

“You can’t ask that of me! Think of what you’re saying!” 

“Fine, then it’s my choice.” 

There’s a rough jostling that makes Techie jerk blindly in his bonds. He can’t see the man or the woman clearly, or the wailing bundle of warmth beside him that is ripped free while the woman shrieks and fights, feral and futile, nearly dropping Techie as she struggles. Techie whimpers, teeters, tries to free himself from the memory even as some other part of him burrows back into it, questing. 

Below him, everything shakes. It’s her: the woman. His mother. She’s crying, clutching him to her chest as ships take off overhead. They stumble together under a shadowy overhang, out of the sun, but really it’s just her stumbling, carrying him. They’re both crying, throats already raw from it, ripped apart by the loss.

Techie gasps as if emerging from deep water, breaking through the surface of the recovered memories and back into reality. Before him stands Kylo Ren, who has taken off his mask. Techie has never seen Kylo’s face before, but he knows that’s who he’s looking at: the sad eyes, soft jaw, awkward nose. He knows who this is because they were connected. Kylo was within him, moving swiftly here and there while Techie lingered behind in the memory of his mother. Kylo saw so much more than that while Techie was stuck back at the origins of himself in helpless wonder. There are echoing footsteps and greasy handprints on the walls of Techie’s mind and coating the interior of his ribs, as if Kylo climbed those like a ladder in the process of investigating Techie's panicked heart. 

“He’s your brother,” Kylo says. “Your twin.”

He’s speaking to Hux, who is moving slowly toward the wall, his eyes wide and unblinking. Hux stares at Techie like he’s waiting for him to laugh wickedly and leap from the chair to attack him. 

“I know you feel it, too,” Kylo says more softly, watching as Hux reaches for the nearest wall like he’s not sure he’ll find it where he left it. He touches it gingerly and then slumps there looking winded, lips parted. 

“Impossible,” Hux says. His voice is scratchy and tired, as if he’s also just returned from that memory of crying himself sick while their father carried him away. 

“You’ll find records,” Kylo says. “Locked up by Brendol long ago, but accessible to you now, with the rank you’ve attained. Your mother and brother were abandoned during the evacuation. She surrendered him to the orphanage when there was no food, when they were both starving. If he had a name, he doesn’t remember it. She never spoke it to him. He didn’t come here to hurt you, didn’t intend to come here at all. He didn’t even want to desert his post. He loves the Order. Not like you do, but enough not to want a different life. The plan to escape was Matt’s idea.”

“No, no,” Techie whispers. He slumps in the interrogation chair, defeated. The aftershocks of the memories that Kylo drudged up and exposed are moving through him like an electric charge, pricking at his fingertips and kneecaps, making him twitch painfully in his bonds. 

“He loves Matt,” Kylo says when Hux remains silent, pressed against the wall as if he wants to crawl through it and escape this scene. “They had no plan to harm the Order, or you. Matt wanted to be free, and Techie-- That’s what he’s called--”

“I know what he’s called!” Hux shouts, voice still ragged. 

“Techie just wanted to be with Matt. He poses no threat to you, aboard this ship or otherwise. He’s frightened, close to experiencing a dangerous level of shock. We should release him from the chair, at least.” 

Hux says nothing. He stumbles from the room in a seeming daze, nearly toppling over when he leans down to grope for his greatcoat on the way out.

Kylo watches him go, sighs. “Come on,” he says, turning back to Techie when Hux is gone.

Kylo waves his hand and all the interrogation chair’s restraints release with an easy _click_. Techie sinks back against the chair, the electric-shock feeling that’s coursing through him increasing to a powerful tremble. He stiffens when Kylo tries to help him stand. His legs won’t work; they buckle beneath him as soon as Kylo guides off the chair. Before his knees can hit the floor, Kylo catches him and hoists him fully into his arms. 

“You’re all right,” Kylo mutters. He uses the Force to summon his helmet. Techie cowers, unable to drag his gaze away as he watches it close over Kylo’s face and lock around the back of his head. 

He’s almost out of his mind enough to clutch at Kylo’s robes as he’s carried from the room like a child. He wants to clutch at something, feels like he’s falling through time and space, attached to nothing and away from all that’s familiar or rational. He closes his eyes as they move through the hall outside, shivers against Kylo Ren’s chest and waits to either land hard or wake up. He fears he’ll be waiting for one or the other for years, the way that he did between the time he lost his eyes and the days when he started sleeping in Matt’s bed, when he regained enough of a connection to the real world to finally feel like he wasn’t always stumbling through the peaks and valleys of a nightmare. When he had Matt. 

He has a thousand questions that he wouldn’t dare to ask Kylo Ren even if he could make his trod-over mind organize the words into sentences or force his dry tongue to voice them. He stays silent, and recognizes the particularly sterile scent of the brig when they return there. Kylo brings him into what appears to be the same room he was taken from when he was brought for interrogation: it’s bigger than he’d imagined the rooms in the brig to be, when he’d worried that he would end up there somehow. The back wall is plain durasteel and the other three are transparent, looking into empty cells to the left and right and facing a barren hallway. Kylo Ren leans down to place Techie on the cot that’s bolted to the back wall, settling him there with an unnerving gentleness. 

Nothing, nothing, nothing makes sense. All Techie knows is that Matt isn’t here, and that losing him now feels like something he should have expected. He certainly feared it, but he didn’t really let himself believe it could happen. Now he’s naked and raw to the loss, fully exposed, without a shred of defense against the full piercing pain of it.

Techie curls up on the cot, rolling toward the wall and refusing to open his eyes. Behind him, Kylo Ren stands and breathes through his vocoder, observing. Techie can feel the lingering remnants of their connection crackling in the air like a threat, dangerous energy that he doesn’t want to touch. When Kylo leaves without speaking or reentering his mind, Techie is glad to be rid of him. He feels pulled thin by this uncomfortably intimate knowledge of Kylo’s existence even as the space between them widens. 

Alone in the quiet of his cell, the information he’s received tries and tries again to reach through his panic and take root. Those memories of his mother felt as real as drawing breath does now, and so did the bundle beside him, the thing that was taken from him before she was. His brother. He didn’t have words for it back then, and had been far too young to comprehend the conversation between Brendol and his mother that Kylo unearthed, but something in him kept the sense memories and had held on tightly enough that Kylo could extract and translate them. 

None of it seems as real as the loss of Matt, and even what came before that seems like a dream now: the trees, the lake, mushrooms on toasted bread, their own private shower, wind that moved through leaves. The thought that they could have been free, and his own pitiful idea that if Matt believed in it so strongly that would be enough to crack through the barrier that still holds them: it seems now not just foolish but maliciously ignorant, a trap he made for himself consciously and then sleepwalked into. Any attempt to put the concrete pieces of his actual life together splinters hopelessly around him, and he hugs his knees to his chest, wondering if Matt is in pain, if they’re hurting him right now.

Just before exhaustion pulls him into a threadbare sleep, he wonders if being General Hux’s brother might help him save Matt’s life. 

But none of it feels real enough, or connected enough, to empower him. 

**

Waking up is different here. It’s nothing like when Matt petted him awake before their shifts, and also unlike the wrenching, sudden awareness that a nightmare had ended and he was alone in the aftermath. The nightmare hasn’t ended, and his attempt at sleep was too self-aware to make waking feel sudden at all, as if he was holding himself just outside of it, watching rather than resting. 

Someone is entering the cell behind him. He thinks he recognizes the gait already, or suddenly, in light of new information, and tells himself that’s idiotic, but when he rolls over it really is Hux, entering alone and holding a stack of folded clothes. 

Hux pales, regarding Techie on the cot and keeping his distance. There are no guards visible in the hallway outside, through the transparent walls. Hux is wearing his greatcoat but not his hat. Maybe he wants to show Techie his face now, to pretend that he’s not afraid. 

“Here,” Hux says, taking two quick steps toward the cot. He sets the stack of clothing on the floor and then retreats, walking backward. “Put those on,” he says when he meets Techie’s eyes again. “You’re filthy.” 

Techie sits up. Everything aches. Every thought is Matt: where is he, what is he feeling, what can be done. The smartest move is to obey Hux’s wishes, surely, to curl up at his side like a helpless thing and try to engender some kind of bond, but Techie feels something hateful curdling in him at the thought. He doesn’t trust Hux. It was never a thought that entered his mind before, this deep and quickly growing resentment. It’s as if he’s feeling it on Matt’s behalf, finally understanding where his anger came from. 

“Go on,” Hux says, and then he sits on the floor, which looks so absurd that Techie feels again like he’s plummeting through an incomprehensible landscape. Hux folds his legs beneath him and shrugs off his coat, staring at Techie with open interest. He’s still especially pale, and there are heavy purplish circles under his eyes. 

The thought that Hux wasn’t able to sleep propels Techie toward the pile of clothes. He picks them up and stands, hugging them to his chest and staring at Hux. Atop the pile of clothes is a washrag made of much finer material than the standard issue ones they’re provided with at the laundry. The clothes feel nicely made, too. Techie rubs his thumb over the fine weave of the pants, which are at the bottom of the stack. 

“They ought to fit,” Hux says, something dark passing over his face. “Though I suppose you’re thinner than me.” 

Techie turns his back on Hux and moves toward the sink. He’s shaking, tired, hungry, but none of that is as important as what he’s got to do next. He has to make Hux want to help him, and has to make Hux understand that the only way to do that is to spare Matt’s life. 

He’s afraid to ask if that’s still even possible. But, no-- He would have felt it. Like a claw ripping his soul in half. Matt has to be alive. If he was alive during Techie’s questioning-- and why would Hux lie-- Hux won’t be in a hurry to execute Techie’s accomplice before he finds out more about why Techie is here. Kylo Ren can’t tell him everything, and Hux doesn’t seem to entirely trust Kylo, anyway--

“Are you all right?” Hux asks sharply when Techie just stands there at the sink, paralyzed by dread. “There’s-- You’ve got soap there, haven’t you?” 

Techie scans the rim of the sink and nods when he sees a small gray bar, fresh out of its standard-issue box. 

He takes his pants off first. They’re not damp anymore, but his underwear are, more from sweat than piss. He can smell himself, but he’s so resigned to what must be done that it doesn’t seem embarrassing or even weird to undress in front of Hux. He hears Hux’s pinched intake of breath as he pulls off his shirt, revealing the scars on his back. 

“Fucking hell,” Hux mutters while Techie stands there naked at the sink, soaping up the rag listlessly and checking the hallway for observers. “They-- The slavers did all that to you?”

“No.” It hurts to speak; did he really scream that much? “The, uh. The gang. That owned me. Before.” 

“Right, I-- Of course.” Hux makes a throat-clearing sound and shuffles in place, still on the floor. “I read your file. Found the records from Fleer, too. Our mother didn’t give her name when she surrendered you to the orphanage, and in the record of our birth she was only listed by her servant registry number. I don’t suppose-- You don’t, ah. Know her name, I’m sure?”

“No.” 

“Right. Of course not. Even Ren couldn’t-- Well, never mind. It’s irrelevant, anyway. Almost impossible that she would have survived there on her own. I’m not sorry to tell you that our father is dead.” 

“Oh.” Techie finds that he’s not sorry either. 

“He had a heart condition, so you’ll want to see about getting that checked. I personally have a full chest mediscan annually, though it wasn’t genetic so much as due to bad habits, in Brendol’s case. He was a glutton, an undisciplined man, and he didn’t like me.” 

Techie turns from the sink. He’s scrubbed the worst of the filth off of himself and is now working on his chest. Hux meets his eyes and shrugs. Some color has come onto his cheeks. 

“I know you’ve had it far worse,” Hux says, with a bite of what sounds like defensive anger. “But I didn’t exactly have a charmed childhood under our father’s care. If it could even be called that. I was his property, expected to perform certain functions, not unlike a droid. Not unlike a slave, you might even say. He wanted his money’s worth, and always made that clear. He’d spent certain resources on me and awaited a return on his investment.” 

Techie nods and turns back to his washing, bringing the rag up to clean under one arm, then the other. He doesn’t care about their father or about Hux’s childhood in comparison to his own. He’s burning to ask about Matt, but Hux seems to want to talk. Techie tells himself to be patient and listen, for Matt’s sake. 

“I’m investigating the circumstances of your purchase by the Order,” Hux says. “I will not accept the idea that it was a random occurrence, even if I was just a lieutenant stationed elsewhere when you first came to the _Finalizer_. Something or someone was behind reuniting us, surely. Were you ever approached by personnel onboard who wanted to know about your background?” 

“No,” Techie says. He washes his face and winces into the soapy cloth when he holds it there, wishing he could lash out at Hux for this paranoid idea that Techie is only here because someone is plotting against him. Maybe paranoia is something they have in common. 

“And you never looked at me,” Hux says, his tone sharpening as if he’s sensed Techie’s buried rage, “Never looked at me and thought, that’s my face? My old face? I’m on all sorts of holo propaganda.” 

“I don’t, like, look very closely at that stuff.” 

Techie winces again, internally chastising himself. That sounded snotty, critical. He’s so tired, and he’s never been good at hiding what he feels. 

“But you must have thought--” 

“Yes,” Techie says. “But I didn’t, ah, I didn’t think it meant anything. So I looked like you, so, like, what? It was just like any stranger who might resemble another. I didn’t think it meant you were my-- Anything.” He never would have entertained the idea that a powerful General of the First Order came from the same pathetic origins as an ex-slave who felt lucky to be bought by a faction of well-heeled bullies who didn’t beat him. 

Techie sets the damp rag down and reaches for the small towel atop the pile of clothing. It’s soft and finely made, like everything else. He reminds himself that Hux brought him these nice things as a peace offering, and that if he squanders this in anger or exhaustion it will cost Matt his life. 

“Thank you,” he says when he turns, wrapping the towel around his waist. “For-- For talking with me. I-- I didn’t mean, um. I didn’t want to cause you trouble. Honestly. We were just, we just--” 

“Deserters,” Hux says, nose twitching. “Yes, I’m familiar with the inclination. As a boy I dreamed of a different life. I can remember plenty of times when I _just_ wanted to run. I outgrew that childish fantasy when I developed a sense of responsibility and of gratitude. Life alone with Brendol would have been utter hell, but the Order was there for me. Others helped me, gave me the life I have now. Have you no appreciation for how I tried to provide for you here? The atmosphere of security, of respect for hard work? I didn’t know we had anything to do with each other, and still I gave you a private room, let you work remotely from a station there, let you have this little shore leave excursion upon request. And you threw it all back in my face at the first opportunity.”  

“I’m sorry.” Techie knows he doesn’t sound sincere. He reaches behind him and grips the sink. “I did-- I do-- I appreciate, ah. All of it, but. He wanted to go, and--” He can’t hold it in any longer, is starting to tremble again, can see the ends of his hair shaking when he looks down. “Is he okay?” he asks, louder than he intended to. “Please, just. Please don’t hurt him, please, I’ll do anything--” 

“Stop begging.” Hux’s face is hard when Techie looks up again. “It’s a disgusting sight, seeing-- You, looking like-- You must know there’s nothing I can do. Only a handful of people are aware of your escape attempt at present, but that’s enough. Stormtroopers talk, even the ones on remote locations like the two you stunned when you stole their transport. An example must be made, and I can get away with saying that you were forced to desert, but he’s got to be dealt with according to protocol.” 

“No!” Techie lets go of the sink and steps forward. He wishes he’d dressed before getting to this part. He’s crumpling already, knees shaking like they might give out. “Please,” he says, though Hux asked him not to beg. “He’s-- He’ll go through reconditioning.” Matt might say that he’d rather die, but Techie will agree to anything that buys them time. “He won’t try this again, I won’t let him, I promise, I’ll make sure of it--”

“Right, like you stood up to the fool on Jungka? No, no-- Look, I am sorry. I know what it’s like to get attached to a hothead and swept up in his bullshit. But you’ll thank me someday--” 

“You don’t understand!” Techie says, shouting this with enough force to get Hux to his feet. He’s glowering now, and so is Techie. “I would never-- I couldn’t-- I’ll die, if he does. You’d be killing me, too, and I’d hate you, I’d _hate_ you--” 

“Well, that’s hardly my primary concern,” Hux says. He’s holding his greatcoat, brushing it off as if this is a casual conversation, even as his face turns bright red. “I have a military operation to run, and desertion is a serious offense. I can’t be seen giving favor to some bald-faced traitor just because I have a surprise twin brother who’s infatuated with him.” 

Techie steps forward, not even sure what he means to do. One slicing look from Hux stops him in his tracks. It’s a warning, and Techie thinks of the weapons that must be concealed inside Hux’s boots and tucked into that greatcoat. Brother or not, he won’t have come in here unarmed. Techie sinks to the floor, ready to beg again, hating himself for not having handled this better and hating Hux, too. As if those two hatreds are entwined already.

“You’ve been through an ordeal,” Hux says. The measured concern in his voice is like being dragged across razorwire. Techie snarls at the floor, fisting his hands over his knees. “That man nearly got you killed. Had I been away from the ship I might have ordered your execution without questioning you myself, and then where would we be? I want to help you--” 

“Then you’ll spare Matt. Please. Kill me instead of him, if you need to set an example.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous. Where’s your sense of self-preservation? You must have some, to have endured the life you had before the Order and still be standing. Figuratively, at present.” 

_You’re a monster_ , Techie thinks, grinding his teeth together to keep the words in. _Like our father_.

“I’ll return when you’ve composed yourself.” Hux sounds haughty, pleased. As if he thinks this went well. “Obviously, we have much to discuss once cooler heads prevail.” 

“Please,” Techie says when he hears the cell door slide open. He looks up and sees Hux arranging the greatcoat over his shoulders, standing in the open doorway. If Matt were here he might try to rush Hux, might at least attempt to get in a punch to the face. “Armitage,” Techie says, letting all the rage wash away from his features. He needs to show Hux what begging really looks like. Needs to see all the way into him, to glimpse something beyond his cold determination. Something they might actually share. “Armitage-- Hux. General. Sir, please. He’s, he’s-- He’s the only thing I have.” 

“That’s not true at all,” Hux says, and then he goes, hurrying away as if he’s afraid of what Techie might say next. 

The door slides shut behind him and Techie remains on his knees, naked and shaking, feeling parts of himself already evaporating into the air. He wants to scream, to throw himself against the transparent wall and rage like a lunatic. He can’t move. He can’t do anything: even with this amazing windfall, this unique foothold, an intimate audience with the only person who could save Matt: still he can’t do _anything_.

 _It’s your fault_ , he thinks, looking at his reflection in the transparent wall. It’s blurred and indistinct, but even a polished mirror would show him just as he is: a trembling ghoul, so useless that he might as well be a holo projection blinking with static, barely there.

 

** 

On the bed, he pulls a thin blanket over himself when the shivering makes his teeth chatter. He can hear the hum of the cool air they’re pumping into the room, and he thinks of that hum in his and Matt’s room, not so far from here but barred to them forever now. The hum in their room is different, though it comes from the same circulation system and is pumped in through the same type of vent. That hum was a promise, and a warning: _don’t leave, don’t go. Stay here, where it’s safe_. This hum says, _I told you so_ , and _it’s too late_. 

When the cell door opens again Techie remains on his side, facing the wall, the blanket dragged sloppily over him. The approaching footsteps are different from Hux’s. These are more graceful and unhurried. The air inside the cell shifts and pricks at Techie’s skin with new awareness, his bones going tense when he recognizes the feeling. Kylo Ren has returned. 

“Sit up,” Kylo says. “I brought you something.” 

Techie jerks upward thinking, insanely, that Kylo might have brought Matt. But of course he didn’t. Unmasked and alone, Kylo is holding a meal kit and a thermos filled with what looks like some kind of thick juice. Holding these things in massive hands made for crushing throats, Kylo looks as absurd as Hux did when he sat on the floor like a kid. 

“Why aren’t you dressed?” Kylo asks. “It’s cold.” 

Techie says nothing, injured fury simmering under the surface of his skin as he waits for Kylo to invade him again. 

“Eat,” Kylo says, walking forward with the meal kit. “And drink this. I made it for you. I drink it after periods of physical and psychic strain. It will help you recover.” 

“Recover?” Techie stares up at Kylo, experiencing a cleansing kind of fearlessness. Kylo has nothing to offer him. “From what?”

Kylo doesn’t mention Techie’s interrogation, that sensation of having his very essence scraped at from within and examined, stepped on, but Techie feels as if he can see Kylo thinking of it. Kylo’s mouth moves in a guilty quirk, anyway, and he sets the food and thermos on the bed beside Techie. 

“Put these on,” Kylo says. He uses the Force to levitate the clothes that Techie left on the edge of the sink. They hover over Techie’s lap before dropping there. “We need to talk.” 

“About what?”

“Matt.” 

Techie stands, nearly losing the blanket over his lap and holding it over himself just in time. The clothes tumble to the floor.

“Did Hux kill him?” The question hurts, even though he doesn’t think the answer is yes. 

“No, but he wants to. If you cooperate with me, I can talk him out of it. Hux isn’t the sole wielder of power around here. Obviously. Put those clothes on. Do as I tell you and we can work together.” 

“You’re Matt’s friend.” Techie’s eyes whir madly, something in him trying to remember how to make the tears that would be soaking his cheeks now if those ducts hadn’t been yanked out. “He always said so. He told me, ah-- It’s one of the first things he said to me. That you’re his personal friend.” 

“Hm. He may have been exaggerating. But I do want to help you. Him, too.” 

“Why?” Techie asks, still frozen with the blanket held over his dick. 

“Maybe I know what it’s like to want to escape. That’s enough questions from you. Get dressed.”

Kylo turns around to face the cell door. Techie almost wants to laugh at this pretense of offering privacy, after Kylo dove into his mind without reservation. He hurries into the long-sleeved shirt, underwear and pants, then sits on the bed to tug the soft black socks over his feet. Everything feels too comfortable. It all fits too well. 

“Where is Matt right now?” he asks. “Is he-- Are they hurting him? Do we need to go help him now, can we?” 

“He’s all right,” Kylo says, unconvincingly. “They have him in a cell on the next block over.” 

Techie cranes his neck as if he might be able to peer through the thick durasteel walls on outside the two empty cells that bracket his. 

“Can I see him?” Techie asks, his voice trembling with the question. 

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Eat up, and drink that juice. All of it. You’re weak.” 

“I don’t-- I’m not hungry! Or thirsty. How are you going to talk Hux into not executing Matt? Do I need to do anything? I’ll help, ah, I’m not very, very good at talking to Hux, I think I made him mad but he’s-- I don’t like him, I don’t care if he’s my brother, he’s a fucking ass-- Asshole!” 

Techie hears himself and smashes his lips together. Kylo Ren is smiling.

“Eat,” Kylo says. The smile drops off his face as if he’s suddenly realized it shouldn’t be there. “You sound insane.” 

“You’ll really-- Really help us?” 

“We’ll see. So far you’re failing to do as I ask. Testing my patience probably isn’t a good idea right now, in your position.” 

Techie grabs for the meal kit and rips the lid open. It’s a standard ready-to-eat kit with a long shelf life: plasti-wrapped sandwich that tastes of cardboard, hydro-grown fruit that has a too-perfect synthetic texture, and a mealcake with grains that stick in his teeth. He eats it all while staring at Kylo Ren, who stares back without a word. When Techie has swallowed the last bite he gulps from the thermos to wash it all down, making a soft sound at first slosh of the juice over his tongue. It’s surprisingly good, as if it’s been fresh-squeezed from ingredients far superior to those used in the meal kit.

“There,” Techie says, breathless and wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand when the thermos is empty, his stomach already beginning to cramp. “Now tell me how we’re going to save Matt.” 

“You’re like him, actually,” Kylo says. His brow is pinched but his eyes are smiling, maybe taunting. 

“Who-- What? Matt?”

“No. Never mind. I’ve known Hux for a long time. There are ways to get around his obsession with following protocol, but you have to make small moves. You can’t let him see that you’re working him. I’ll handle most of the heavy lifting, but you have to do your part. Act like you want to get to know him. Listen to him when he comes to talk to you. Pretend to be impressed. He’s very interested in you, but he’ll barely admit it to himself. He didn’t sleep at all last night.” 

“You--” Techie bites down on the question before he can vocalize it, then considers that Kylo can read his mind anyway. “You really, ah. Sleep together?”

“Sometimes.” Kylo’s expression becomes less friendly. “Where did you and Matt think you were going going to end up? Did you even have a plan?” 

“I don’t know.” Techie bends forward, his stomach really pinching up now. He takes two handfuls of his dirty hair and squeezes, pulls. “We were, like. Going to figure it out. He told me-- fuck! He thinks I’m a genius. He said that, but I’m just an idiot, I’m so stupid, I can’t-- I can’t live without him so I feel like I’m already dead, sorry.” 

Techie shouldn’t have said any of that. Kylo Ren is not a sympathetic ear. He’s probably only here to spy for Hux, to soften Techie up for some kind of confession that Hux thinks is still forthcoming. Techie knows about this strategy. He saw gang members use it on informants all the time. The ‘mean’ person goes in first, roughs the guy up. Then the ‘nice’ alternative plys him with a few basic comforts. Back and forth like that until they get what they want, when the victim is so disoriented that he’ll say anything to get things to make some kind of sense again. 

“You’re smart enough,” Kylo says. “Matt’s the dumb one. He actually thought he was going to get past Order security that easily?”

“We almost did! That tracker ship shouldn’t have been there, ah, I checked the log files--” 

“You think you have a security clearance high enough to know about every ship out there? Maybe you’re not that smart.” 

“Fuck you!” Techie says, possessed by an untethered rage that feels bigger than even Kylo Ren. He can feel the color draining from his face as Kylo stands and towers over him, transforming back into a human shadow. 

“You’re lucky you remind me of him,” Kylo says. He turns to leave, robe swirling behind him.

“Wait!” Techie springs up, the empty thermos clattering to the floor. “Sorry, I’m sorry, you’re right, I sound insane, I feel insane, but-- Please, please help us, we need you, I’ll do anything--” 

“Then do what I told you to when Hux shows up here again.” 

Kylo leaves without looking back. 

Techie sinks down to the bed slowly, the pain in his stomach cresting. He wants to be sick or black out, to just not be here. Surely he can’t trust Kylo Ren, but at the moment he doesn’t have any better alternative. He’ll do as Kylo suggested. He closes his eyes and thinks of Matt. He’s not so far away, if Kylo is telling the truth. Just on the other side of one of the durasteel walls that houses this block of three cells. He feels himself trying to reach out to Matt somehow, though he doesn’t have the Force. 

Remembering the vent overhead, hearing the hum, he sucks in his breath and looks up at the ceiling, whirring eyes trying to focus on something that isn’t there. He could shout through the vent and hope that his voice might carry far enough to reach Matt, but that sort of stunt could put them both in danger, or at least prompt the guards to move Matt to a cell that’s farther away. Techie chews his lips and stares up at the vent, willing his silent thoughts to travel through it.

 _I’m here_ , he thinks. _Fighting for you. Won’t stop, not ever. Not until we’re both space dust_. 

Considering their potential and quite likely imminent future as space dust, Techie tries to imagine what a realistic non-death alternative could be. They certainly won’t be trusted to serve on the _Finalizer_ anymore, and Hux won’t be willing to turn them loose, as that would essentially be giving them what they tried to steal from him in the first place. Freedom. 

Which leaves what? He closes his eyes when he thinks of Kylo taunting him. _What was your plan?_ Techie didn’t have a real vision for his autonomous future with Matt even before they were captured. It all happened so fast. Between the sudden suggestion that they had to run just then if they ever ran at all and the chaotic, quickly thwarted attempt that followed, Techie never got a chance to settle on even a flimsy fantasy about what would happen next. It was all panic, worry, fear, and now this. Confirmation that he hadn’t been nearly scared enough.

**

Techie isn’t sure how much time has passed when Hux shows up again. There’s no chronometer in the cell, and the hallway outside has remained empty. There has been no further delivery of food, but what Kylo brought him continues to sit on his stomach like a rock, so it can’t have been that long. 

When Hux enters, Techie sits up and braces himself to do as Kylo asked. He knows now that it won’t be easy. The temptation to spring up and demand to know Matt’s condition overcomes him, but he tamps it down with a whimper that hopefully wasn’t audible. 

“I came to make sure they’re treating you all right,” Hux says, lingering near the door. Greatcoat and hat are in place today, and he’s holding a slim package that looks like a holo projector case. The dark circles under his eyes are still present. “I’m told you’ve eaten?”

“Yes,” Techie says, wondering who told him that. He suspects that Hux doesn’t know about his visit from Kylo, and doesn’t plan on mentioning it. 

“Good.” Hux swallows and looks down at the case. He’s nervous; he looks more like Techie when anxiety flickers across his stony expression. “I thought, ah. We could chat.” 

“Okay.” Techie scoots over, offering room on the bed to sit. Hux stares in seeming incomprehension, then moves forward as if hypnotized. 

Hux sits on the bed like it’s something he’s never done before, his posture uncertain and tense. Techie supposes this is the first time Hux has ever done this: he’s sitting next to his brother, letting himself come this close. The sense that Hux is a little afraid of him makes Techie sit up straighter, almost proudly. When Hux looks over at him, Techie holds his long stare, unblinking. 

“Fuck,” Hux says. He takes off his hat, eyes still locked on Techie’s, and runs a hand over his hair. “Does it give you a chill, too?”

“Yeah,” Techie says, lying. The absence of Matt and the danger he’s in make the sudden existence of a twin brother feel small and inconsqeuential in comparison. 

“What do you remember of your childhood?” Hux asks. He shrugs the greatcoat off and adjusts the case on his lap. “Anything-- About her, our mother? Ren says that he had to dig those memories up, that they were only impressions--”

“Right,” Techie says, wondering how many times they’ll have to go over this before Hux will accept it. “Those memories were from when I was, like, a baby. I had no memories of her before, uh-- What he did to me.” 

“It’s unpleasant, I know,” Hux says, muttering. He’s wearing gloves, his fingers twitching around the case. “Painful in a way that’s hard to describe. I’m sorry he did that to you, for what it’s worth. It was necessary.” 

“Right,” Techie says again, more tightly. 

_Be nice_ , he reminds himself, desperate to scream or yank at his hair, panic welling up inside him with no place to vent. _Do what Kylo said. Pretend to be interested_.

“I brought some old holo files,” Hux says, unzipping the case. “I thought you might like to see some images from my youth.” 

Techie withholds a groan and nods when Hux gives him a nervous glance.

Hux boots up the portable projector, and the first image that hovers over it is of a pale, skinny boy of about four years old, dressed in a starched uniform and staring joylessly into the recorder. 

“There I was,” Hux says, and when he quickly flicks to the next image Techie wonders if he regrets this already. “And here’s Brendol. Our late father.” 

There’s something unhappily familiar about Brendol, though Techie only knows him from the heartless voice in that vision that Kylo dragged up. There’s a leering sort of threat in Brendol’s cold eyes, and even the way he carries his heavy-set body seems like an affront to anyone who might want to challenge him, something both aggressive and insecure. It reminds Techie a bit of the way Hux carries himself now, though he’s better at masking the insecurity with arrogance. 

“He never even mentioned you to me,” Hux says, narrowing his eyes at Brendol’s preening Imperial portrait. “I got a crack across the face for asking about my mother, and I never brought her up again.”

“He beat you?” Techie asks in a mumble, glancing over at Hux. 

Hux puts his shoulders back and flicks to the next image. “Of course,” he says, affecting a kind of breeziness. “Now, look, this-- This was Rae. My mentor. She taught me everything. We basically founded the Order together. People laugh when I say that. Ren does, anyway. I was just a child, it’s true, but I already-- She treated me like a full partner and a valuable ally, even then, at the beginning.” 

Rae is an attractive woman of middle-age in the portrait that hovers over the projector, and Techie can see some of Hux’s comportment in the way she holds herself: confident and polished, no flourish beyond a look dares anyone to underestimate her. 

“They made me betray her,” Hux says. Techie looks over at him, surprised. Hux is staring at the holo with a kind of dazed, unseeing transfixion. “But I did it my way,” he says, nearing a whisper. “She’s-- She’ll hate me now, I’m sure, but she’s alive. I made certain that she’d be secure, until I could-- If I can ever go back for her, I’d--” He glances over at Techie and swallows audibly. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he says. “It’s like-- Talking to some alternate version of myself.” 

“Thank you,” Techie says, and he finds that he means it, though his anger is still boiling and every word that wants to come to his lips is Matt’s name. “It’s-- it, ah. Obviously means something, to you. Our being, um. Related. The same, or-- Having this, uh, this thing. This family thing. You could have just, just-- Hated me anyway. For what I did.” 

“I wanted to hate you for existing at all,” Hux says. “It felt like-- Some kind of insult, at first. A copy of me.” 

“I’m not, though,” Techie says. “I mean, ah. I’m not a copy of you any more than you’re a copy of me.” 

“Of course,” Hux says, but he seems annoyed by this comment, his brow pinching. “I only meant that was my first impression.” 

“Ah.” 

“Listen--” Hux sighs and shuts the holo projector off. “It’s absurd that you’re here in a holding cell, in the brig. I want you to have your own quarters, I want to treat you like you ought to be treated, as my-- My responsibility. But I can’t trust you yet. You must understand my position.” 

“Sure, yeah, but--” Techie can feel the need to mention Matt surging up, wanting out. “You can’t, like. You can’t sit here and pretend to care about me while you plan to kill my, my-- Matt, you can’t kill him, please, please--”

“One thing you’ll come to know about me is that I don’t waver in my convictions,” Hux says, shoving the projector back into its case. “And that it’s a waste of time to wheedle like this when policy dictates--” 

“Policy! Puh-- Policy?” Techie grits his teeth and pinches his eyes shut, grabs for his hair. Hux stands and sighs, gathering his things. 

“Perhaps it was too soon for me to return,” Hux says. “Or, yes-- Fair enough. As you say, it might be too much to ask of you just now, to entertain that I can be both a capable General who makes difficult personnel decisions and also a person you can depend upon--” 

“Let me just-- Will you, ah-- Okay, okay.” Techie opens his eyes and tries to take a deep breath. He can’t freak out and fall apart now; Matt needs him. “Can I tell you about how he helped me?” Techie says, rushing this out as Hux zips up the projector case. “How, how-- I could never sleep, okay, I had awful nightmares, every night I relived the day when she took my eyes out.” 

Hux glances up at the word ‘she.’ 

“She called herself Ma-Ma,” Techie says, letting the rage sharpen his tone. “She’s dead now, but in my dreams she’s still so powerful, she-- She still hurts me, she always will. You saw the scars. I was awake when she pried my eyes out with, with-- She used a knife, she was laughing, I can’t-- I can’t even describe the pain, it was beyond physical, it was, was-- An invasion of everything, like having your soul scraped out. And as soon as she finished one she started on the other. I think-- I think that’s part of why it feels like it’ll never be over, what she did. Because I couldn’t-- Couldn’t even process the horror, couldn’t even breathe for how much it fucking hurt, and then it s-started over.” 

Hux holds the projector case over his chest like a shield. He’s trying not to look queasy. Techie knows that look; he’s sure he looked virtually the same when Matt described standing at the edge of canyons and swimming with fish. 

“I was never okay, after, I could only pretend.” Techie takes a shallow breath and exhales, tells himself to keep going. Hux is listening, at least. “Until Matt. He, he-- Changed me, just by being who he is, just by existing and letting me exist near to him, and it-- He showed me how to, like, meditate?” Techie’s voice wavers. How will he ever describe what Matt did for him, the scale of it and the size of his relief? He has to try, but he’s afraid he can’t make Hux or anybody understand. It was too big, too perfect. “He just-- He saved me,” Techie says, voice barely working now. “Please, so. So if, um. If you can, please, maybe if you talked to him, if you saw, saw him as a person--”

“I acknowledge that he’s a person,” Hux says. “That doesn’t change that he’s also a traitor and slated to die. I’m sorry. I won’t sugarcoat it or pretend that I can waver on this. It’s unfortunate, but--”

“Unfortunate!” Techie shouts, ragged voice breaking around the word. “How, how-- How can you say that to me, and then, then-- Then expect me to care about _your_ fucking people who _you_ lost?” 

Hux sniffs and looks at the floor. “You know nothing about being a leader.” 

“I know plenty!” Techie stands. This time Hux doesn’t flinch away. “I knew leaders like you when I was owned by a gang. They had to look strong, so they killed disobedient gang members, to set an example. But all the leaders got killed in the end, too, however strong and cruel they’d seemed. Even Ma-Ma. It was just, just a matter of time!” 

“Are you threatening me?” Hux asks, eyebrows going up.

Techie makes a gut-punched noise and falls to a seat on the bed again. 

“I don’t want to hate you,” he says. “Please, it doesn’t have to be like this. I like talking with you, ah, I-- I want you to know me.” Strangely, this is true, though it’s a distant wish compared to what he needs Hux to do for him first. “Don’t you know that we’ll never be brothers if you kill the only person I love? We’d be enemies. I’d never even look at you again unless you forced me to.” 

Hux shifts the holo projector case in his hands. He seems to be at a loss for words, finally. Techie tries to take this as a good sign. 

“Has it always been men for you?” Hux asks. He looks dimly crazed when he meets Techie’s eyes, or maybe just extremely sleep-deprived. 

“What?”  

“Men, you-- Are you only attracted to men? I ask because that’s always been the way with me, just men. Brendol berated me for it, because, you know. You can’t have children that way. He was always invested in results. The end product. There had to be a point, he would say.” 

“Did you even hear what I said?” Techie asks, deflating. “Any of it?”

Hux opens his mouth, freezes like that, then turns and leaves without responding. 

Techie watches him go. Hux doesn’t look back, and when he passes out of the hallway that houses the cell block, Techie spots Kylo Ren lurking outside before the door closes. 

A short time later, a stormtrooper comes to deliver a meal through a slot at the bottom of the cell’s transparent door. Techie doesn’t touch the food. He lies on his cot, wearing his heartless brother’s clothes and staring at the wall, waiting to have his soul scraped out again. There will always be more to take away, but if he loses Matt he won’t feel whatever happens next. They won’t be able to torture him further. He’ll be an empty shell who resembles the General, nothing more. 

 

**

When the door opens again some time later, Techie knows it will be Kylo Ren. He grits his teeth and keeps his back to the door, uninterested. Just like the gangs did, this fucking back and forth. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone. 

“Don’t make me regret this,” Kylo mutters. 

“I won’t.” 

Techie bolts upright with a noise that’s so full of disbelieving hope that it physically hurts, because that’s Matt, Matt’s voice, Matt standing there with no glasses and a bruised face while Kylo Ren takes a pair of mag cuffs off his wrists. 

The next noise Techie makes is something akin to Matt’s name, and he flings himself across the cell while Kylo Ren stands there frowning and Matt gropes for Techie blindly, or near-blindly. Techie saw Matt’s glasses break, heard them crack against the gloved fist of the trooper who subdued him while Techie gaped and cried out wordlessly, worried, among other spiraling and endless panicked worry, that a piece of broken lens would puncture one of Matt’s perfect eyes. 

But Matt’s eyes are okay, just wet and red-rimmed, lashes fluttering under Techie’s kisses. He kisses Matt’s face everywhere, trembling against him and wanting to climb him even with Kylo Ren watching. He’s as gentle as he can be, because Matt has a black eye and dark purple bruising high on his left cheek. There’s blood caked under his nose. Techie wants to clean it with his tongue, wants his hands and mouth everywhere, as if his touch has the power to keep Matt safe. As if he can just put his hands on all the things he wants to protect and thereby lay some lasting claim to them. 

“Are you okay?” Matt keeps whispering this, his cut-up voice making Techie’s bones cold, because he never thought he’d hear Matt sound weak like this, broken. 

“Yes,” Techie keeps answering, laughing crazily and kissing him still. “Yes, yes, oh--” 

He’s okay now, will be until they take Matt away again.

“I’ll be back when the guards have their shift change,” Kylo says. “Don’t do anything stupid.” 

“Thank you,” Techie says, cradling Matt against him while he snuffles and shakes, trying not to break down completely in view of his idol. “Thank you, you don’t even, don’t even know how much, ah, or maybe you do-- Thank you, thank you--” 

“We both still have work to do,” Kylo says. “Hux is acting-- Strangely. What did you say to him?” 

“I, I don’t know--” Techie can’t think straight with Matt suddenly back in his arms, close to collapsing and hiding his hot, wet face against Techie’s throat. 

Kylo shakes his head. “We’ll talk later. I sensed extreme distress. Get him to pull himself together.” 

As Kylo leaves, Matt begins to sink to the floor. Techie goes down with him, holding his face and whispering, barely keeping track of what he’s saying. It’s mostly a stream of _it’s okay, it’s okay_ , though of course it isn’t. Kylo exits through the door that leads out to the brig’s main hallway and Techie kisses Matt’s lips as they twist into a grimace, his eyes pinched shut so tight that it must hurt, with all that tender bruising being tugged at. When Matt finally lets out a sob, Techie closes around him and holds him, feeling as if he’s solely responsible for keeping Matt’s bones from shattering against the weight of his despair. He’s feeling surprisingly up for the job, suddenly not afraid. 

“I’m sorry,” Matt says, sobbing this out against Techie’s shoulder when he’s able to speak, after a few failed, gasping attempts. “Sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry--” 

“Shhh, it’s not your fault. I’m the one who, who missed the monitor ship, I should have looked deeper--” 

“No, no, fuck--” Matt lifts his face, but only to press it to Techie’s cheek while Techie strokes his lank curls. “Please, please, oh _fuck_ , please don’t blame yourself, it was me, I fucked up your life, I’m so fucking stupid--”

“You’re not, and you haven’t ruined my life. Matt! Look at me, shh, it’s okay, listen. Something wonderful has happened.” 

Techie swallows heavily and tries to believe this is true when Matt blinks at him through soaked lashes, his face contorting with the fight to keep from sobbing again. 

“Wonderful?” Matt says, sputtering. He moans and cups Techie’s cheek. “Did they-- Buh-babe, did they hit you in the head? They hurt you, didn’t they? I’ll fucking kill all of them--”

“No, I mean, well, yeah, they locked me up for a while, in one of those chairs, but then Kylo Ren came in, and-- You remember when we had to watch that holo about space station safety? A-and Hux came on to give some stupid mission statement at the end? And you said, you said-- You said, hey, the General kind of looks like you?” 

“What?” Matt searches Techie’s eyes, probably still convinced that he’s lost his mind due to torture or severe head injury. 

“He’s my brother,” Techie says, aware that this will only further Matt’s suspicions that he’s gone insane. “My twin. Did Kylo Ren tell you? We’re working together to keep you safe. Me and Kylo. It’s gonna be okay, I promise.” 

“I don’t--” Matt shakes his head, sucks in a choppy breath and lets Techie dry his cheeks. His confusion has at least put a stop to the sobbing. “I don’t understand.” 

“Me either really, but when you see me and Hux together you’ll know. It’s weird, it’s fucked up, but it’s what’s going to save us.” 

“I wasn’t even sure you were still-- Still alive.” Matt’s eyes grow wet again, but they don’t overflow. He holds Techie’s face, clamps his lips together and exhales powerfully through his nose. “Are you really okay?” 

“Yeah!” Techie wants to doubt this, probably should, but it feels so true, now that Matt is in his arms again. “I’m still, uh, working out all the details of this whole, like, Hux is my brother thing, but it’s gonna be good. Especially with Kylo helping us-- He brought you to me! That’s, like, such a good sign. I didn’t know he was gonna do that. And after I screamed ‘fuck you’ in his face, even!” 

“You--” Matt sniffles and sits back a little, studying Techie’s eyes. “You screamed ‘fuck you’ at Kylo Ren?”

“Yeah, and lived to tell about it! I think he might be in love with the General, like, you know, everyone’s always saying they fuck? Well, he’s been nice to me, or, kind of, anyway, and I think it’s because I look like Hux. He-- He was in my head, man, he rewound my memories to find out where I’d come from, I heard my mother’s voice, and my father, too, but he’s dead.” 

“Dead?” Matt says, slumping into Techie’s arms again. 

“Mhmm.” Techie drags his fingers through Matt’s hair, kisses his forehead. He’s exhausted; Techie can feel it in the weight of his heavy limbs, can see it in his puffy eyes. “But it’s okay, our dad was a shithead. I love you,” he says, whispering this and bringing his face down to nuzzle at Matt’s. “Love you, so much, oh fuck you’re okay, you’re here, you’re okay.” 

“I fucked up,” Matt says, his voice tightening again. “I did, I fucked up so bad. I was supposed to protect you.” 

“You will,” Techie says, nodding. “But right now I’ll protect you. C’mere, do you want to get in bed? Do you want something to eat?” 

Matt lets Techie help him to his feet. He’s wearing the same clothes he was arrested in, and he smells like dried sweat and blood, but to Techie it’s a fine perfume. He wets the cloth Hux brought him and uses it to clean Matt’s face, taking special care around the bruising. He makes Matt drink some water from the sink, then watches as he very slowly eats some of the rough wheat crackers from the dinner tray that Techie had ignored. 

“There you go,” Techie says, tucking himself to Matt’s side when they recline on the cot together. He brushes cracker crumbs from Matt’s shirt, moaning with regret at the dark blood splatters staining it. He tells himself it could have been much worse and lifts his face, kisses Matt’s jaw. “See, you’re okay,” Techie whispers, licking at his salty skin and at the dark blond stubble on his cheek.

“I was losing my shit,” Matt mutters, clinging to him. “Thinking they were-- Hurting you. And I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t do anything.” 

He winces and curls in tighter. Techie pets him, holding him close as the threat of another breakdown passes. 

“Do you even believe me?” Techie asks when Matt looks up at him, eyes hazy but dry for now. “About Hux being my brother? Or do you think I’ve gone nuts?”

“He does look like you.” Matt sniffles and nudges at Techie’s face with his nose. “But that’s pretty fucking nuts.” 

“I know. But it’s true. I remember, um, when you showed up, when you came into my life and just did everything right, everything-- I thought, this is too good to be real. And that’s how this feels, ‘cause it’s the one thing that can save us. But sometimes the too good things are real. Like-- Like you.” 

“Fuck, I love you,” Matt says, grabbing the hem of Techie’s sweater and tugging him closer. “You’re the bravest person in the galaxy. Look at you, you’re fucking calm. I thought. I was so worried.” 

“You thought I’d be catatonic with terror, shrieking and pissing myself?” Techie grins. “Yeah, that happened, too.” 

Matt drops in and out of an exhausted, delirious sleep. Techie holds him and whispers that it’s okay, that he should rest. At one point he drifts off, too, with his face cushioned in Matt’s curls. He doesn’t dream, and doesn’t manage to forget where he is or what’s happening. Periodically he lifts his head and checks the hallway that runs along the cells, waiting for Kylo Ren’s return.

He’s decided that he won’t let Kylo take Matt back. He will stand up and fight fucking Kylo Ren if he has to. Hux, too, if he comes. Any number of stormtroopers. Matt isn’t leaving this cell without Techie. 

When Kylo returns, Techie wakes first. He pushes at Matt’s shoulder and the pitiful, lost noise Matt makes only strengths Techie’s resolve. They will not be separated. He puts his arm over Matt’s back and sits up, watching Kylo with what he hopes is a threatening stare, even as his rational self reawakens and reminds him that he has no weapons, no real strength, no choice but to fall on the mercy of whatever Kylo offers him. 

Matt sits up when he hears Kylo enter, blinking heavily. Just as Techie did, he puts his arm out protectively. Matt’s arm is at least a significant barrier, if also useless to keep Kylo Ren from doing whatever he plans to do. 

Kylo removes his helmet and lingers near the door, looking uncertain. He glances from Matt’s face to Techie’s, and Techie is probably flattering himself, but he thinks something about the twin looks of trapped-animal rage they’re giving him have at least managed to unsettle him a bit. 

“I’ve made some progress,” Kylo says, leaning against the far wall. “But Hux is sort of-- Losing it.”  

“What do you mean?” Techie asks. 

“He wants you to be his buddy,” Kylo says. “And he knows that won’t happen if he orders your boyfriend’s execution. But he thinks not doing it would make him appear weak. I’ve suggested an alternative. I think he’s coming around, but he’s extremely stubborn. Even when there’s no way forward except to change course. That’s when he really digs his heels in.” 

“You-- You spoke to the General on my behalf?” Matt shifts behind Techie, half lowering his arm. 

“I’m doing this for Hux,” Kylo says, expression darkening. “He wants his brother, he’s-- Always wanted this. Subconsciously. If he ruins it, he’ll never forgive himself. He knows that. I just have to make him accept it.” 

“Can I help?” Techie asks. “If I spoke to him again--” 

This quickly becomes not purely theoretical: the door out in the hallway opens again and Hux hurries inside, looking furious and aiming his glower at Matt, then at Kylo. He’s wearing some kind of non-regulation pants and shirt under his greatcoat. Pajamas, Techie realizes, when Hux walks into the cell and grabs the front of Kylo’s shirt, yanking him off the wall. 

“What the fuck is this?” Hux asks, pointing at the bed, at Matt. “Behind my back? This is treasonous, I’ll never trust you again--” 

“Calm down.” Kylo holds up both hands in a sarcastic surrender and swoons in to lower his face toward Hux’s, glaring at him. “You’re a sleep-deprived lunatic right now. I’m taking care of things.” 

“Taking care of what? Letting them go while I slept? I knew that fucking juice was a ploy, I only pretended to drink it-- Laced it with sedatives, did you?” 

“You’re paranoid. This is developing into a nervous breakdown.” 

Hux shoves Kylo against the wall and turns to snarl at Matt and Techie. “Maybe one of you will be honest with me,” he says. “In exchange for your lives-- What the fuck is Ren doing to me? What’s his plan, how does hiding my twin brother onboard my ship factor into it? Where’s this all _going_ , you fucking impossible fucks?”

Hux wavers on his feet. His eyes are a bright red now, and his lips are visibly shaking with what appears to be livid rage as he tries to hold himself together. Kylo makes a gesture with his hand, behind Hux’s back.

“Get the bloody Force off of me!” Hux shouts, jerking as if he’s being held in place by invisible bonds. “I don’t need your help! I don’t need-- I don’t--”

He goes quiet when Kylo’s hands settle on his shoulders. Techie and Matt stare in motionless awe, watching as the great General swallows and squeezes his eyes shut. 

“Come on,” Kylo says, whispering this behind Hux’s ear. “You’re asleep on your feet. They’ll still be here after you’ve rested.” 

“I don’t believe anything you say.” Hux doesn’t sound like he means it. He’s staring at Techie, searching his face for something. Kylo rubs his thumbs in slow circles on Hux’s shoulders, looking like he’s forgotten the prisoners are present. 

Techie realizes he needs to do something. Hux is teetering on some kind of ledge. Kylo Ren can only do so much, clearly. There’s a feeling Techie gets right at the center of his chest when Hux holds his gaze. He hadn’t noticed it earlier, in his dizzying panic. Now something feels changed, and he lets the feeling grow within him. It’s something like, _he’s me_ , only that’s not right. Hux is still a stranger, and so different from him. But Techie did know him, once. When they were shuddering bundles in their mother’s arms. Before that, too. Before they were even people yet. 

“I’m not here to hurt you,” Techie says, realizing only then that Hux hasn’t heard this from him yet, only from Ren. “I think I-- I don’t know, but. I think I missed you.”

Hux makes a soft sound at the back of his throat and twitches in Ren’s grip. 

“It’s just that I never had--” Hux says, but his voice dies off there. He shakes his head and goes for the door. Techie notices then that Hux is not wearing shoes, just black socks that are identical to the ones Techie has on. 

Absurdly, Kylo Ren gives them a thumbs up before turning and following Hux out. 

When they’re gone, Techie exhales and looks at Matt. He laughs under his breath at the expression on Matt’s face: bleary disbelief, and something that makes him look very young. Hope, maybe. 

“Wow,” Matt says. “He really is your brother.” 

“What convinced you?”

“Uh. The way he looked when he was about to cry. That was you, suddenly. I almost felt bad for him.” 

Techie settles down onto the bed, sighing with anxious content when Matt gathers him up the way he usually does before sleep, as if there is anything usual about this moment or whatever’s going to happen next. He smiles tiredly when Matt kisses his closed eyelids. 

“You want me to talk?” Matt asks as Techie nuzzles into his chest, seeking out the sound of his heartbeat. It’s a little faster than normal, and still so strong. 

“Only if you want to,” Techie says. 

“I don’t even-- I don’t know what to say. What happens now?” 

Techie doesn’t know. He kisses Matt, moans with gratitude when Matt returns the kiss along with a huff of stale breath, and until they fall asleep that’s what keeps happening next, with varying levels of desperation and determination, long enough to make their lips throb. Whatever really comes next, it’s good to drift into a half-doze with this feeling: kiss-sore and clutching at each other, terrified but together, huddled up in a bed onboard the _Finalizer_ like they would be if they were only waiting to wake for breakfast before their next shifts. 

**

Eventually they wake, dry-mouthed, and drink from the sink before making a listless meal of the remaining food on the dinner tray. Techie’s sense of calm frays and then dissipates as they wait to see who will come next: Kylo Ren or an execution squad. Techie doubts Hux will appear again anytime soon. He imagines Hux sleeping very deeply somewhere, maybe with Kylo Ren watching over him. The mood Hux is in when he wakes will determine Matt’s fate, and Techie’s along with it. Techie gives Matt nervous smiles, pretending that he has some innate knowledge of what his twin will do next, and that he’s sure it won’t be anything bad. 

The trouble is that he still can’t imagine what the good thing Hux might do could be. When the door to the hallway finally opens Techie wants to protest that he’s not ready, as if it’s up to him to come up with a happy outcome and offer it as an alternative to certain death. He’s surprised to see Hux marching in, properly dressed now and trailed by Kylo Ren, who wears his helmet and doesn’t remove it when the two of them come to stand just inside the cell’s open door. 

“According to the official record,” Hux says, tipping his chin up so that his command cap shadows his eyes, “You’re both to be transferred to the detention center on Lanos for further questioning by Kylo Ren prior to your executions.” 

Hux lets that land, his gaze snapping from Matt to Techie. 

“Official record,” Techie says, not having missed that. 

“Yes. In fact, Ren will be taking you to an out-of-use Imperial radar station in the deep Outer Rim. It’s a station I had considered reviving, but ultimately I left it off our charts in case I ever needed it for personal use. As a safehouse. I may still need it as such someday, at which time, if Matt is still using it as a residence, I would expect to be accommodated. But I doubt it shall ever come to that, which is why I want you to seriously consider staying here, where you could enjoy a life of relative luxury while I continue to conquer the galaxy piece by piece.” 

He’s speaking only to Techie now, holding his stare. Something fragile trembles under Hux’s stoic expression. Techie feels it more than sees it.

“You know I want to go with him,” Techie says, speaking softly. He’s afraid to hope this could be it: release, reprieve. Escape, in a sense. 

“I thought you might say so.” Hux squares his shoulders. “So I need you to also be aware that this is a very no-frills location, to put it mildly. I would provide you with basic supplies to get started, but you would have to feed yourselves, ultimately, and beyond the remoteness of this place there is no real security. No entertainment, no local population to mix with. You’d be alone there, entirely, going mad together most likely.” 

“I’ll take it,” Techie says, already nodding. “Thank you-- Thank you. Thank you, oh--” 

“Enough. I’m not doing this for your personal enrichment. I think you’re a fool and that you’ll regret this decision deeply within weeks. But I won’t force you to stay here, if miserable exile with this man is really what you want for your life.” 

“Yes,” Techie says. He’s holding Matt’s hand; he doesn’t remember reaching for it but is now squeezing very hard. “I do want that. Thank you. Hux--” 

“Suit yourself. In that case I’ll have Ren take you away at once.” Hux steps aside as if to suggest Matt and Techie should rise and walk out the cell door. “We’ll put you in mag cuffs, of course, for appearance’s sake.” 

Techie wonders then if this is a test, a trick. He glances at Kylo, but the mask reveals nothing. Hux has his hands clasped behind his back and is avoiding everyone’s eyes. 

“What made you change your mind?” Techie asks. He shouldn’t push it, but he can’t trust that everything is okay yet. He can’t even make himself stand from the bed. 

Hux turns toward him. He looks angry at first, then lost. 

“I got a full cycle of sleep,” Hux says, snapping the words out. “It makes a world of difference in one’s ability to think clearly, as I’m sure you know.” 

“Yes, I-- I know. Yes.”

“Get up, then!” Hux barks. “Both of you, let’s go. I’ve wasted enough time on this tiresome melodrama.” 

Techie stands first, still holding Matt’s hand. Matt seems wary and moves slowly, like he’s trying to decide on a plan of attack. As if they have any choice but to go with Kylo and hope that he’s really taking them someplace safe. 

Hux stands near the door, jaw tight, looking at nothing in particular. He only meets Techie’s gaze when Techie comes to stand right in front of him. Techie wonders what Hux would do if someone put their arms around him, if he would even know it was an embrace and not some form of aggression. Kylo Ren may have hugged Hux before, but that seems strange and unlikely, even in the midst of so many strange and unlikely things. 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Hux asks, leaning in close to mutter this into Techie’s ear. “You can stay, you know-- I wouldn’t make you live in the brig. You’d have everything you wanted here on my ship, I swear it. I know you feel indebted to this person for whatever reason, but he’s just some man.” 

Techie stares into Hux’s eyes when he pulls back, then looks pointedly at Kylo Ren. Hux seems to understand; his cheeks go pink and he lifts his lip a little. 

“Right, well,” Hux says. “Goodbye.” 

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” Techie says. He knows he should just shut up and go, but Hux’s face holds him in place like a tractor beam. It was unbelievable to think he’d ever look into the face of his twin brother, and now, so quickly, it seems impossible that this could be the last time.

“It would be extremely dangerous for me to be found having any contact with you,” Hux says. “So this is farewell, forever. It’s a shame, you know, but-- I know what it’s like to be imprisoned by familial obligations. So. You’re free of me.” 

Techie pulls Hux to him without thinking and holds him with both arms. Hux stiffens. Kylo Ren and Matt make similar noises of surprise. Techie isn’t normally one to touch anyone but Matt, with or without prompting, and he feels like he’s probably doing it wrong. 

“I’m sorry,” Techie whispers, his mouth close to Hux’s ear. He’s not sure what he’s apologizing for. Not remembering their mother, not recognizing Hux as his twin after seeing him in holo propaganda, trying to run away without knowing him, running away now that he does. He’s not really sorry for any of that, but he does feel a prick of remote sadness budding within the torrents of nervous hope that are pouring through him. 

Hux says nothing, and he’s red-faced when Techie pulls back. They hold each other’s gaze for a few seconds more, then Techie turns. He doesn’t look back as he follows Kylo Ren and Matt out of the cell. Kylo puts mag cuffs on Techie’s wrists, then on Matt’s. 

“Come,” Kylo says, taking Techie’s arm in one hand, Matt’s in the other. 

Techie’s breath catches and he cranes his neck, looking back over his shoulder before Kylo can shove him through the door, out into the brig. He only gets a brief final glance at Hux, who is standing inside the cell and watching him go, arms crossed over his chest, mouth pressed into a thin line. 

It’s not as if Techie wants to stay: he doesn’t. The _Finalizer_ isn’t his safe haven anymore, and as long as he has Matt with him he’ll be able to make a new one. But on the march toward the transport that will take them away from here forever, he does feel a sense of having left something behind. He tells himself it’s just like when he left his wire figures in Ma-Ma’s lair, and like the ones he’s leaving behind again now. They weren’t actual friends. They didn’t need to be cared for like real people. They were just cold little objects with sharp edges and nothing but a vague sentimental value.

 

 

**


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter!! Thanks so much to all who have let me know they've enjoyed this one. Writing this made my love for secret twins Techie and Hux even stronger <3
> 
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> **

A few cycles ago, the short transport ride down to Jungka had Techie panicking. He was barely able to stand once they’d landed for fear of what came next: the unknown, a wild environment, a wide sky overhead. Now he’s neither calm nor numb but feeling very still, as if he’s turned into a tree and any wind that blows against him won’t topple him. He’s already survived more than he thought he could ever handle, and for maybe the first time in his life he’s actually eager to find out what will happen next. 

Matt is silent beside him while Kylo Ren pilots the craft, still wearing his helmet. Kylo hasn’t spoken since they left the _Finalizer_ , and Techie has no idea how long this journey will take. They’ve already jumped in and out of hyperspace, and he can’t see any planets through the front viewport.  Techie keeps trying to harness the courage to pose some question to Kylo, but whatever came over him when Matt’s life was on the line has deserted him now. His voice shrinks and dies in his throat every time he opens his mouth; it will be safer, probably, to say nothing. Matt is swallowing audibly at times and holding his hand. Every time Techie considers that Matt can barely see anything that’s happening he squeezes his hand with aching sympathy. 

Finally, he can’t wait any longer to speak. 

“Are, um. Did Hux put any, like, eyeglasses? In with the supplies? For Matt?”

Behind them there are four large crates of supplies lashed to the walls of the transport, which is a nondescript, bulky thing that Techie is surprised Kylo Ren is willing to pilot. It has no style, and he seems to be obsessed with appearances. 

“Seems unlikely,” Kylo says. He keeps his masked gaze focused on the front viewport and the dense silence in the transport recollects around them. 

Techie glances at Matt, who gives him a nervous look. 

“It’s fine,” Matt says, whispering. “I can learn to, uh. Live like this.” 

Techie swallows down a moan, though he knows he can’t really complain, that they’re lucky to even have their lives after what they did. It’s just that anything to do with loss of vision slices a particular kind of pain into his heart, and then there are the practical concerns. At some point they’ll have to find food on this planet, and if Matt can’t see, Techie will have to do the hunting, fishing, gathering, whatever. 

The hard seed of buried worry sprouts in Techie’s gut and grows quickly. He shifts in his seat and tries to pretend that his breath hasn’t quickened. He can’t panic right now. Later, maybe. They have to get where they’re going first. He feels Matt squeeze his hand and tries to manage a smile. If Matt could see clearly, he’d probably notice that Techie’s adrenaline-fueled sense of acceptance is beginning to crumble. As it is, he just gives Techie a tired, uncertain smile back in return. 

“I’m so glad they didn’t break your teeth,” Techie whispers. As soon as he’s said it he feels stupid, but the quiet is really starting to get to him, and there’s no real reason not to talk. Kylo Ren didn’t instruct them to stay silent.

“Yeah, the teeth will probably come in handy,” Matt says, and Techie smiles again, for real this time.

Techie wants to talk more, wants to keep hearing Matt’s voice, but the pressure of being overheard by Kylo Ren is too much. Everything that comes into his head seems too ridiculous or disrespectful to voice. They owe Kylo their lives more than Hux, but he’s so remote and strange, like a droid closed around a person who only emerges when it suits him. Techie watches the viewport for any signs of the planet they’re approaching and tries to imagine what Kylo and Hux’s private conversations are like. Kylo said he’s known Hux for a long time. Techie’s foot bounces as he quashes question after question that he might ask Kylo about his brother. It doesn’t matter now. They’ll never know each other. 

“Oh,” Techie says when he realizes that what looked like another star in the distance is getting bigger: a sand-colored dot with a single bright pink fleck of a moon orbiting close, no other planets nearby. “Is that, ah. Is that it?”

“Yes,” Kylo says. “It hasn’t got a name. This is an untraveled segment of the Outer Rim, near Wild Space. This station was used to monitor the edge of the uncharted regions. It was designed to detect any irregularities that might emerge from the unknown.” 

“Irregularities?” Techie says, heart clenching as his fingers tighten around Matt’s. “Like, like-- Like what?”

“They didn’t know what might appear. That was the point. But nothing did. That’s why it’s a dead station. There’s some weaponry on the tower but it’s nonfunctional now. Same goes for the transmitters. If anything happens out here, you’re on your own.” 

“We know that,” Matt says. 

Techie is surprised, both that Matt talked back to Kylo Ren so boldly and that he apparently knew that their destination is an unsecured tower on the precipice of lurking chaos. Techie didn’t know. Though maybe Hux tried to tell him. At present, all Techie can recall is Hux highlighting the lack of entertainment and other people in this location, both of which Techie was perfectly happy to view as features rather than bugs when he was still waiting to see if Matt would be dragged off for execution. 

“What’s the wildlife like?” Matt asks. 

“There’s enough for you to eat. Nothing with teeth big enough to eat you.” 

Kylo seems to know quite a bit about this planet. Maybe he’s just sensing things, but Techie doesn’t think that’s how the Force works.

“Did you, like, suggest this location?” he asks.

Kylo grunts. “Hux was hoarding it for himself,” he says. “I saw it in his paranoid dreams.” 

“You spy on his _dreams_?”

Techie didn’t meant to sound so scandalized or scolding. He shrinks when Kylo turns halfway toward him, his gloved hands still moving on the transport’s console. 

“You should thank me. Spying on Hux’s dreams is the only reason I ever-- He dreamed about me,” Kylo says, his tone sharpening. “So you might say I had the right.” 

Techie wouldn’t say that, but he keeps his mouth clamped shut and doesn’t say otherwise either.

As they draw closer, Techie’s heart speeds up. He keeps hold of Matt’s hand and wonders if he should describe what he’s seeing, since to Matt it must only look like a beige blur. Techie can see other features as they prepare to land: windstorms, clearing hazy clouds that rush across the viewport as soon as they hit atmo, and a huge mass of dark water that makes him squeak a little bit at the back of his throat. It’s an ocean. He’s never seen one, and from this vantage point it looks like a swallowing thing, like something they won’t possibly be able to avoid plunging directly into. 

But they don’t. They land instead on a low, dusty coastline made up mostly of flat rock and some dirty-looking sand just before the rocks that are submerged in waves that break gently on the shore. There’s a bog nearby; Techie can smell it as soon as Kylo pops open the transport’s back hatch, sandy wind instantly blowing inside. Techie winces and curls in on himself, wants to ask Kylo to close the door. But that would be pointless: this is their new home. Once they leave this transport, no other will ship come for them. This place is where they will live and someday die, and he can’t breathe. He can’t feel his hands or his legs. 

“Babe,” Matt says, very softly. Exhaling through his gaping mouth, Techie looks over at him, then down at their clasped hands. 

“Oh-- Shit!” Techie is gripping Matt so hard that it must hurt: his skin is pulled tight over his knuckles, whitening. Techie can’t seem to let go, even as he grows horrified with himself. “Sorry!” he says, wanting to calm down, to reclaim what he thought might actually be some kind of lasting sense of capable calm-- Ha. “I’m sorry, I can’t, it’s just, I don’t think I can breathe this air-- ah, ha, something feels wrong, like, it’s getting in my lungs--”

“You’re fine,” Kylo says. He’s using the Force to unstrap the crates, levitating them off the transport one at a time. “This place doesn’t always look so shitty. The windstorm won’t last forever. Get up, both of you.” 

Techie manages to uncurl his fingers from Matt’s hand enough to release it. He meets Matt’s eyes and lets Matt help him stand, clings to Matt’s arm after he has. Together, they turn and face the open hatch, the world outside. Kylo is already done unloading the crates. They’re all hovering just over the ground, bobbing a little against the heavy wind. 

“This way,” Kylo shouts. “Hurry. I could still change my mind about how this goes down. You two are starting to put me in an executing mood.” 

Techie doesn’t think he means it: he’s more afraid of the barren terrain outside than of being harmed by Kylo. Still, it seems prudent to do as Kylo says. In gratitude, if nothing else. Matt takes a step forward, and Techie follows, shuffling in his steps and keeping very close to Matt’s side. They make their way off the transport and onto the raw earth, Matt blinking while he tries to make his eyes focus, Techie cowering against him and thinking of what Hux said before they left: that he would regret this. Deeply. 

He makes himself take a deep breath and look around while Kylo lines the crates up and floats them toward a stark radar tower that looms over the coastline, its only feature. The sea is glassy and dark, and the bog is bubbling in the distance; Techie can just faintly hear popping slurps from its thick surface. Beyond that there is a horrific-looking forest of very tall, bare trees that are like towering sticks growing so close together that from here it looks as if a normal-sized human couldn’t walk between them. Like monstrous blades of nightmare grass, Techie thinks, swallowing a whimper and letting Matt pull him along after Kylo, toward the tower. 

Remember, idiot, he thinks, pinching his eyes shut. _You could have died. Matt could have died. Hux could have made you his prisoner after killing Matt in front of the entire Order to demonstrate that he had the power and the right to do so. This is a mercy. To shrink from it is an affront to what you begged for: this chance, this scrap of freedom which is more than you might have ever had. This place is home now. Don’t hurt its feelings._

Thinking of the planet as a thing with feelings makes him look at it differently when he opens his eyes. If Jungka was like a representation of Matt, glistening with plentiful comfort, this place is more like Techie. Threadbare and pathetic at first sight, seemingly useless, unwelcoming. But maybe there’s something more under the surface. He thinks back to how he shouted at Kylo, at Hux, and breathes a little more steadily. He can do this. He has to do this: is already doing it. They’re following Kylo Ren into the radar station, behind the crates. It’s dark inside and smells like a cave full of treacherous minerals, but it does feel good to be out of the stinging wind. 

“Lights,” Kylo says. “Eighty percent.”

Nothing happens. Kylo grunts as if offended, then takes off his helmet. Techie’s night vision reveals sand all over the floor and boxy shapes against the wall, covered in tarps. There’s a staircase in the center of the room that leads up through a hole in the floor above them, roughly the same design as the other station. 

“So there’s no power,” Kylo says. “Huh.” 

“We can get by without it,” Matt says, and again there’s something defiant in his tone that makes Techie want to prod him and say that maybe he shouldn’t talk to Kylo that way. Kylo doesn’t seem to have noticed. He sets his helmet on the floor and starts popping off the tops of the crates. Techie cranes his neck and sees that each one is efficiently packed with all sorts of supplies: one contains cooking utensils and toiletries, another has clothing and bedding, all neatly folded. Techie wonders who Hux trusted to pack these. A droid, probably. He surely didn’t do it himself. Whoever did it seems to have been instructed to pack for two exiles, presumably before Hux got Techie’s answer to his offer to stay onboard. Hux knew he would say no. 

“Whoa,” Kylo says, sounding alarmingly like Matt for a moment, without the vocoder. “Check this out.” 

He reaches into one of the crates and pulls out the kind of manual bow Techie has only ever seen in holo films. It’s cast in durasteel, and even without an arrow pulled against its string, Techie cringes away from it. Kylo reaches down again and pulls out a quiver full of metal arrows. 

“This is from his Academy days,” he says. “I can’t believe he’s giving you this. What the hell.” 

“Hux?” Techie says. “That’s-- His?” 

“Well, it’s yours now.” Kylo tosses the bow and arrows back into the crate. “For hunting, I guess. There’s fishing stuff in here, too. Where did he even find this? Shit, what am I saying.” Kylo scoffs, surveying the open crates. “These are his supplies. Stuff he hoarded in case of his own exile.” He looks up at Techie. “This is why I never told him about you.” 

“What, you-- sorry? You never told him, ah, you mean-- Before? About me? You knew?”

“Not precisely. But I had this feeling, like--” Kylo looks at the crates again. He summons his helmet with the Force and it smacks hard against his palm. “Like you’d be his favorite person right away, if he found out who you were. And here it is. Proof. He gave you all his contingency plan shit. I guess he thinks he can start over. It’s not that hard to collect emergency supplies, in his position. But still. This is a big deal.” Kylo looks up again, glowering at Techie now. “Don’t squander it.” 

“I-- I won’t! Of course I won’t, I-- You should, could you-- You could tell him, like. How much this means to me. Please, would you, um. Would you tell him that?”

Kylo puts his helmet back on. He seems agitated, but Techie still doesn’t feel threatened. 

“Hux knows how much you owe him,” Kylo says. The vocoder makes him sound cold again, but not indifferent. “Just stay here and keeps your heads down. The food he packed should last you around seventy cycles, a hundred if you supplement with whatever you find here. By then you’ll have needed to figure out how to kill or harvest most of food on your own.”

“I can do that,” Matt says. “I grew up doing that.” 

Kylo turns to Matt, and Techie wonders if he’ll scoff and mention that Matt is near blind now. Instead, he steps forward and holds out his hand. Matt stares at Kylo’s hand in confusion for a moment, then clasps it and gives him a firm, answering shake. 

“Thank you,” Matt says. He’s holding Kylo’s masked gaze, approximately, as if they’re staring gravely into each other’s eyes. “For everything.” 

“Don’t let anything happen to him,” Kylo says, still holding Matt’s hand in his grip. Presumably he means Techie.

“I won’t,” Matt says. 

Kylo releases Matt and turns to Techie. He steps closer and Techie holds his ground, remembering the first time he ever encountered Kylo: in the lift that day. He’d been terrified, frozen, and he’d felt something that he’d assumed was just an elevated level of intense panic, a kind of proximate but unintentional scrutiny from being so close to that much power. Now he knows Kylo was scanning him with the Force, investigating. Maybe it was the hair color that made him curious. 

“I still don’t understand,” Techie says, speaking softly and wishing he could look into Kylo’s actual face while saying this. “Why you didn’t, ah. Tell him. About me, about what you sensed.” 

“You’ll figure it out eventually.” Kylo puts his hand out. Techie stares at it, somehow surprised that he’s being invited to shake, too. When he does, he’s annoyed by how hard Kylo grips his hand. As if he still has something to prove. “Don’t worry,” Kylo says. “You’ve gotten this far because you’re like him. He wants to rule the galaxy, and he’s getting pretty close. All you want to do is survive. You can. You will.” 

Techie stands in the tower’s open doorway with Matt and watches Kylo return to the transport, his robe whipping behind him in the wind. It’s not true, Techie wants to say, though Kylo is already as good as gone and there’s no point in telling him. But Techie doesn’t just want to survive. Just surviving was what he was doing when he was holed up in Ma-Ma’s fort, shaking and forcing himself to eat even when everything about being alive seemed repulsive and wrong. Also when he was aboard the _Finalizer_ , all those years alone, cowering away from roommates until finally he was shoved into his own little supply closet to live out his days, a droid-like servant to a system that at least wasn’t carving off more pieces of him. Only when Matt showed up did he want something more than survival, and he understands now why they had to leave the Order to have it. He takes Matt’s hand when Kylo’s transport lifts off, leaving them here. To their own devices, with their modest riches. 

Techie and Matt turn to each other when Kylo is gone, and there’s something like awkwardness suddenly between them. Techie laughs nervously, and Matt gives him an uncertain half-smile that just makes him look sadder. 

“Sorry,” Matt says, his voice thick. 

“For-- Huh? For what?”

“I don’t know.” Matt looks down at the floor. “I guess I thought. I didn’t think it’d be like this. I thought once we got wherever we were going, I’d take care of things. I’d show you how great it was going to be, on our own. And now I don’t even--” 

“Let’s unpack,” Techie says, grabbing Matt’s arms. He can’t stand to see Matt despairing; it’s wrong, like looking at the world with alien eyes that don’t actually belong to him. “And-- And we should go upstairs, look around, like, we haven’t even seen the top two floors! I bet there’s a kitchen, like in the other station, and-- A shower, do you think?”

“There’s no power,” Matt says, glancing in the direction of the staircase. Squinting. 

“But, but the plumbing might still be functioning, you know, they must have set it up to be pretty hardy in a station like this, and there’s all that water outside, so? Here, let’s-- Let’s see if he packed anything that will fit you, um. Changing into clean clothes will, like, make you feel better, I bet.” 

Techie goes to the crate with the clothing, hands shaking. He’s not sure why he’s expecting to find things big enough to fit Matt until he does, and he grins when he lifts out a fairly enormous shirt and pants that are big enough to fit over Matt’s thighs. 

“Hux packed things for me?” Matt says, kneeling on the floor beside Techie and running his hands over the fabrics. They’re nice, not quite as fine as what Techie is wearing but close. 

“No,” Techie says. “This is Hux’s stuff, like Kylo said. The stuff he packed for himself, in case-- In case of-- I mean, look. There’s a bunch of stuff big enough for you. Boots, even. He, like, packed this for Kylo Ren. So he could take Kylo into exile with him.” 

“There are Kylo’s?” Matt’s tone is reverent. He sniffs the shirt, and Techie laughs. 

“What does it smell like?”

“Nothing, just laundry soap.” 

“Ah, well. Anyway, here, like-- Give me the dirty stuff. We’ll start a laundry area. We can put it wherever we want!” 

Techie winces when he hears himself trying to make this detail of their new freedom sound exciting. He stays on his knees on the floor and watches Matt undress. 

“We could look upstairs for a shower?” Techie says. “Before, like, if you want--”

“Are there underwear in there? I don’t think Kylo wears them, but. Maybe Hux wanted him to start, if they were gonna be exiled together.”

“How do you know-- Never mind. Okay, let’s see--”

Techie turns back to the crate and hunts around, finding no Matt-sized underwear. His hand brushes a slim black box tucked against the back side of the crate, toward the top. Something about the light weight of it makes his heart speed up as he pulls it out and flicks open its latches. 

“Oh,” he says when he sees what's inside. His eyes whir and refocus, and he lowers the box carefully over his knees. 

“What is it?” Matt asks, squatting down beside him. “Is that-- Shit, are those--”

“Glasses,” Techie says. His voice is cut up, and he thinks of Hux having these made-- When? He must have referenced Matt’s medifile at some point, put in a rush order, would have taken pains to keep it all hushed up. “Three pairs,” Techie says, his fingers trembling in the air overtop them. They’re gleaming, catching the light from the open door behind them. “He made you two backups, even.” Techie takes the first pair out and hands them to Matt. 

“Fuck!” Matt beams when he’s slid them on. He blinks at Techie a few times before turning to look around the room. “They’re my mediscription, yeah, perfect-- Shit, fuck, look at that ocean!” 

Matt hops up and hurries to the open door, still naked except for the glasses. He’s still grinning when he turns back to look at Techie. Despite the bruising on his face, with his limp curls ruffled by the wind and his eyes focused and bright, he looks like himself again. 

Techie rises slowly to his feet and thinks of Hux saying _I’ll give you everything you need, I swear_. He smiles at Matt and hurries over to throw his arms around him. Holding Matt in the doorway, gasping out a few disbelieving breaths of aching, aching gratitude, he recalls the updated technician's protocol manual he was given when Hux took over as General of the _Finalizer_. At the bottom of several data files was a sort of motto in flashing print: _Details are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!_ He laughs against Matt’s neck when Matt rocks him in his arms. 

The glasses aren’t the only thoughtful detail included in their crate. They unpack everything, bringing most of it up to the empty radar room on the second floor for inventorying, and in the process Techie discovers a large supply of the eyedrops he was prescribed in medbay. He imagines Hux waking after a long sleep and immediately securing these things for him, having them stuffed into his supply crates and going to the brig knowing what Techie would say to his offer to stay. When Matt isn’t looking, he hugs one of Hux’s sweaters to his chest. The climate here is on the cool side, and maybe Hux is like Techie in weather like this: prone to feeling cold, thin-skinned and shivery. He might have considered this when packing. The blankets in the same crate are practical, big and good for insulating oneself fully on a bed or elsewhere. Techie can tell just by looking at them. 

After the initial joy of finding the glasses, Matt goes quiet in a determined way, carrying things upstairs according to Techie’s instructions and then surveying what’s been left behind in the station to add to their supply inventory. It’s not much that will be of use, aside from a broom that Matt uses to sweep out all the rooms while Techie uses the lab kit Hux packed to test the water. It’s safe for drinking according to the kit but smells strange, not entirely unlike the bog aroma that wafts in when they open the windows to air the upper rooms out. These windows have screens with a very fine weave, but some sand still manages to get inside, and Matt sweeps again. 

Techie cleans out the storage area around the little kitchenette on the top floor, which is identical to the one in the station on Jungka, except that the stove has a chamber for burning raw materials. He can hear Matt poking around downstairs, moving things and walking about with heavy steps. Techie assumes he’s organizing supplies until he hears what sounds like a rusty door creaking open. 

“Everything okay?” Techie asks, sticking his head down through the hatch atop the stairs. 

“Yeah.” Matt has opened the inactive radar column. He’s trying to act casual about it, but even in the low light through the windows Techie can see that he’s flushing. “Just wondered if I could kickstart the power. I bet-- I mean. I think I could repair this. There’s all kinds of junk downstairs, under those tarps, I haven’t sorted it yet but it looks like parts--” 

“We probably shouldn’t, like, mess with that,” Techie says, gut clenching. He shakes his head. Matt can be so reckless! Techie was determined not to be mad about it when they were in mortal peril, or before, when it seemed like that recklessness was evidence only of courage. 

“I know.” Matt shuts the panels up hurriedly. “Sorry, just. Wanted to check it out.”

“It’s okay.” Techie feels guilty for being annoyed. “The stove has a wood-burning compartment, or, I mean, I guess we could burn whatever in there, like-- There’s a vent. It’s not like there was ever another power source here, and I don’t think we could cook outside like they did on Jungka, I mean, with that wind, which. I don’t know how often that wind happens, but. Anyway, we can use the manual stove function, so. We don’t need power to, like, cook. At least.” 

Matt nods. He’s staring at the radar column, hands on his hips. “Is the shower still working?”

“Yeah, I ran it for a while and then turned it off. Nothing slimy came through.” The water has that funny smell, but there’s no sense in mentioning it. “You want to clean up?”

“I was thinking we should walk around outside first. Get the lay of the land before the sun goes down.” 

“The lay of the-- Yeah? You think?” Techie doesn’t think that’s strictly necessary. There’s enough work to do inside, and they’ve already got a lot to adjust to without going out there looking for more. The past cycle has altered the course of the rest of their lives, for crying out loud. One thing at a time, would be his approach. But he doesn’t want to fight, and doesn’t like the idea of Matt wandering the landscape out there alone. “Ah-- Okay. Let me put my boots back on.” 

Hux’s boots, he thinks, when he laces them back up. They were waiting for Techie on the transport after Kylo marched him there in Hux’s socks. Another thoughtful detail. He wonders what Hux is doing right now, and if Kylo has returned to the ship yet. Hux will question him fiercely about how everything went, if he’s not reluctant to show Kylo that he cares. Maybe he’ll pretend to be disinterested, or too busy to inquire. Maybe he really doesn’t care. But if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have had a lab droid manufacture not just one set of glasses for Matt but three. Hux doesn’t even like Matt; he was ready to let him die, until he understood how fully and permanently Techie would hate him for it. So he then wanted Matt to be not dead but well-equipped, for Techie’s sake. Because he knew Techie would be lost without his protector, in trouble. 

Matt sticks his head up through the hatch, peeking at Techie from the stairs. “You okay?” he asks. There’s something frightened about the question, and Techie considers that Matt heard what Hux said, too: _you’ll regret it, deeply_. Techie smiles and nods. 

“I’m okay,” he says, standing. It’s true, or true enough. It’s just that he can’t see the future at all anymore, not even a little bit. He doesn’t even know what tomorrow will look like: the ocean might boil at daybreak. Womp rats might rain from the sky in the night. But unforeseen good things could happen, too, so he follows Matt down the stairs and back to the first floor, then outside into the dimming light from the planet’s reddish sun. 

The wind has mellowed some but is still constant. In the distance, the stick-like trees that tower like a wall rustle together. They sound hollow when they knock against each other, and the only leaves are a few flimsy-looking ones at the top. Way out in the ocean, some frightfully large creature is glowing, moving just under the surface of the water before diving deeper. 

“I guess it doesn’t have teeth,” Techie says. 

Matt says nothing and watches the thing closely until the last of its pulsing glow disappears, his jaw tight. 

“Teeth?” he says when it’s gone. 

“Whatever, um, whatever that thing out there is, it must not have teeth because-- Because of what Kylo said, about nothing being able to eat us here-- Do you think he was telling the truth?”

“Sure.” Matt tries to look certain, shifting his gaze to the water again. There’s something unnerving about how calm it is, and the way the waves slosh gently against the rocks is like the echo of whispers from below. Matt tucks his arm around Techie’s shoulders. “It’s so fucking great to be able to see again,” he says, tilting his chin up to look at the sky.

“Ha, yeah, I-- I remember that feeling.” 

“Oh-- Shit, sorry, I’m sorry, that was a fucking stupid thing to say--”

“No, it wasn’t!” Techie kisses Matt’s cheek, then licks him there, enjoying the stubble. Matt usually shaves every morning, so this is new. “I’m not offended,” Techie says, murmuring this against Matt’s ear. “I just-- I know. I’m so, so glad you can see. I, uh, I didn’t want to say it before, didn’t want to hurt, like, morale, but I was pretty sure we’d be entirely fucked without your vision.” 

“I don’t know about that. You were doing pretty good on your own, without me.” 

“I was not! And it was just luck, because of Hux-- It was crazy luck, that’s all. C’mon, let’s look at the, like, bog thing. The ocean is freaking me out.”

They both scan the surface again before turning. That glowing creature is nowhere to be seen. 

The bog smells like damp rot, but isn’t as scary as the ocean. There are frog-like things jumping around in the sharp reeds near the edge. Matt and Techie stand a few feet back and wrinkle their noses, watching the surface bubble and pop. 

“Hux really picked this place for himself?” Matt says. 

“Well, it’s-- Yeah, ‘cause it’s safe. It’s out of the way. No one would want to come here-- Think, think to come here, I mean.” 

“What do you think those slime hoppers taste like?” 

“Uh. I don’t know, I don’t-- Know what a slime hopper is?”

“They have a few less eyes, but the ones I ate as a kid looked like these things. They were good if you roasted them.”

“That’s-- That’s good.” Techie glances up at Matt, wondering if he wants to go back inside yet. It’s getting darker, and the sky is taking on a dried-blood quality along the horizon, behind the hollow-sounding tree things. “Are you hungry?” Techie asks, tugging at the hem of Matt’s shirt when he seems to be drifting too deep into some probably not great thoughts. 

“Mhm, yeah. You see how straight those trees are?” he asks, pointing. “And thin? That’s good. We can use that auto ax he packed to cut some down, it’ll probably be easy. And not just for firewood. I could build things, with trees like that.” 

“Good,” Techie says, hugging himself to Matt’s side when a gust of wind blows a stinky faceful of bog smell against them. “I’d-- I’d like that, if you built things.” 

They walk back to the tower, stealing cautious glances at the ocean on the way there. The surface seems to be darkening, but that might just be the sky’s reflection or Techie’s paranoia. If Matt noticed this, he doesn’t mention it. When they get back inside they climb the stairs to the third floor in silence, their footsteps echoing in a way that seems dangerous, as if they have to be quiet in order to remain undetected on this place, at the edge of Wild Space. They’ve outfitted the bed that’s built into the wall with fresh sheets, and Techie laid blankets overtop it. The toiletries have been lined up on the shelf inside the narrow shower. Techie isn’t sure if it’s much smaller than the one in the tower on Jungka or if he’s imagining things, but he doesn’t join Matt under the water, just sorts through the food supplies until Matt is done, then takes his turn. 

The water in the shower is ice cold and smelly, so a romantic shower probably wouldn’t have been possible even if they had squeezed in together. Techie washes quickly, glad at least that the soap has a nice scent that combats the water’s aroma, which isn’t horrible, not like the bog, but doesn’t seem entirely clean. When he’s done he still mostly smells like Hux’s bath products: something citrusy and sharp in the soap and a shampoo that reminds Techie of one of the spices they used in the sweet buns they sometimes served in the mess on the _Finalizer_ , on special occasions like the anniversaries of great Imperial victories in battle. 

“It got dark outside,” he says, perhaps idiotically, when he’s dressed in clean clothes and watching Matt add water to an insta-bread pot. 

“Yep,” Matt says. “Check out the ocean. You can see it from that window.” He nods to the one on the wall opposite the kitchenette. 

Techie goes there cautiously, not sure he wants to see. The wind has died down and the air is clogged with a kind of salty mist that seems to rise off the surface of the ocean and blow inward. Techie’s night vision flashes on and he blinks it off, not wanting too an exact a glimpse of whatever’s out there. He gasps under his breath when he sees the ocean sparkling with glowing lifeforms. These are smaller than the one they saw diving far out, gathered near the shore as if they’re feeding on something that’s growing on the rocks, darting here and there and mostly yellowish in their glow, with some greener ones mixed in. 

“Pretty fucking cool, yeah?” Matt says. 

“Yeah-- Yeah, sure, totally. Cool.” 

Matt laughs, and Techie turns, waiting to see him make a kiss face or some other indication that he wasn’t making fun of Techie’s obviously lukewarm reaction, but Matt is still focused on the bread pots, mixing one up for Techie now. 

“There are noodle buckets,” Techie says. 

“Yeah, I saw those. Thought we should save them.”

“For, like-- For what?”

“Uh-- I don’t know, for when we’re hungrier, I guess. Like, after we’ve chopped down trees and dragged the lumber back here.”

“Oh.” Techie should have known that. “Right, sorry.”

Matt doesn’t say _don’t be sorry_. He serves up the bread pots at the table and opens a packet of blue butter, setting it between their two portions with a little knife for spreading. 

“Sir,” he says, gesturing expansively to their dinner. “Your meal is served.” 

“Thanks.” Techie grins and joins him. He wants to close the windows, can hear strange noises that he fears are coming from far out somewhere in the ocean, but they need the light from the bright pink moon to illuminate their dining table. 

He’s still hungry after finishing his bread pot with exactly half the butter packet spread over it, but he doesn’t say so. It’s smarter to save food, of course. They still have to figure out how to catch the slime hopper-like creatures and whatever they can get from the ocean, then test it with the lab kit to make sure it’s even edible. There are almost two hundred testing stims, by Techie’s count. Hux is nothing if not incredibly prepared. 

In bed, watching Matt undress in the light through the still-open windows, Techie wonders how long Hux’s ghost will haunt this place. He’s in all their things, after all, and Kylo Ren is in the clothes that Matt is folding over the back of one of the kitchen table’s durasteel chairs. Techie scoots over to make room for Matt under the clean sheets and heavy blankets. It’s not as cold here at night as it got on Jungka. In fact, it might be a little warmer than it was when the wind was blowing hard, but Techie needs the blankets even so. The weight of them is almost as important as the weight of Matt when he sits on the mattress and stretches out beside Techie, reaching for him. 

A sense of real security finally closes around Techie when Matt’s arms wrap around him in bed, when Techie’s cheek rests on Matt’s chest and he presses kisses over the pump of Matt’s heartbeat. They touch each other and sigh for a while, with a combination of contentment and reluctance to speak. Matt takes his glasses off and sets them on the shelf that runs behind the bed like a kind of headboard.

“I should stay awake,” Matt says. He’s mumbling, tired, playing with Techie’s hair and holding him so close. “To make sure, you know-- Maybe we should keep that axe by the bed. Or the bow and arrow.” 

“I can’t believe he gave us a fucking bow and arrow,” Techie says. His voice is also sleepy, sluggish. He didn’t realize how close to passing out he was until this moment. “Kylo said-- He said it was from, like, the Academy days? Is that what he said?”

“Uh-huh.” 

“Fuck, I wonder what that was like. A First Order Academy! It might have been worse than, like, working for a gang and stealing, crawling through ducts--” 

Techie makes himself shut up. Normally this is when Matt would be talking, but he can feel Matt’s limbs growing heavier around him, his fingers going still in Techie’s hair. He’s falling asleep; whatever he says, he must trust this place not to kill them in the night. 

“I love you,” Techie whispers, and then he feels bad for saying it: as if it should be obvious, in this moment. As if he’s trying to make certain of something, testing Matt with a kind of verbal stim. 

“Love you,” Matt says. He kisses Techie’s forehead, rubs the back of his neck. “Do you need me to, uh. Talk?”

“I don’t know-- No, go to sleep, you’re worn out. Me too. I’m, I just need-- This, this is all I need.” 

Matt gives him a tired squeeze. It’s true, but with every strange creak and howl from outdoors Techie wakes and tugs Matt more fully onto him, like he’s a shield. He wishes Matt would wake up, too, but he’s out cold. Maybe if I had a nightmare, Techie thinks, but if he does have one, he doesn’t remember it. Maybe every real-life noise he thinks he hears in the night is actually part of some bad dream that gets snatched away before he can process it. 

The room seems to go blood-dark in the deepest of night, and then as Techie wakes between progressively longer stretches of sleep, a faint pink glow overtakes this dense draping of darkness. It’s not the moon, which set some time ago. It’s the rising sun, which feels like some kind of victory, as if he and Matt cast a line and pulled it back up themselves by surviving the night. Techie rolls over in Matt’s arms, settling into the loose spoon of him and finally slipping into real sleep sometime around dawn. 

Though it really hasn’t been that long, it also seems like an eternity since he awakened to Matt’s warm breath on his cheek, Matt’s lips soft on the rim of his ear, Matt’s big hand soothing down over his shoulder and along the length of his arm under the blankets. Techie almost doesn’t want to wake, afraid that it can’t be real, because hasn’t something changed? He presses back into the feeling he wants to chase and gasps at the back of his throat when he Matt shifts forward like he needs this just as bad, exactly as much as Techie does. The kisses along Techie’s jaw grow hungrier, more wet. 

“Is that you?” Techie asks, eyes still closed. His voice shakes, even as his lips twitch into a smile. 

“Yeah,” Matt says. He licks up the length of Techie’s neck, spreads his fingers between Techie’s on the mattress. “It’s me. I’m here.” 

Techie nose twitches. He can’t smell the bog, but these sheets are finer than any he’s ever known, and when he opens blinks his eyes open he doesn’t recognize the light that fills the room. It’s new, hazy and soft with just the faintest hint of red. He rolls onto his back and grins up at Matt’s sleep-heavy eyes. Matt’s curls have dried to an especially fluffy texture in this planet’s air. 

“You sleep well here,” Matt says. 

“Me! You do, man, I woke up a few times and you were sleeping like the dead.” Techie winces; bad expression. “Sorry, I mean-- You were, uh. Resting well.” 

“Did you dream?” 

Techie shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Maybe? Nothing that like, stayed with me, though. My mind was just totally checked out, once I got to sleep.” 

“You looked so peaceful.” Matt’s eyes get pink at the corners, but he swallows whatever emotion was building down when Techie kisses him on the lips. For a while they writhe together in the bed, and Techie thinks of the somewhat alarming quantity of lube Hux packed into the crates. It’s downstairs, and neither of them are hard. Techie is preoccupied, thinking of what awaits outside the windows. 

“Have you looked yet?” he asks.

“Hmm?” Matt is nuzzling at his cheek, still in need of a shave and getting a little scratchy now.

“Out-- Outside, like. What’s going on out there?” 

“Looks kinda dismal, to be honest. No wind yet. There’s some kinda fog. Want breakfast?”

“Yeah, please.” Techie is starving. Hux must not like Health Crunch, because he didn’t pack any with the food supplies, but there are some other things Techie is eager to try. 

Techie wraps himself in a blanket while Matt dresses. He walks to the window that looks out on the ocean, his feet cold and already collecting sand as he treads across the floorboards. The ocean is covered by a thick mist that sits heavy over the land, too, gathered around the tower like a warning against setting foot outside. Techie sniffs the air, beginning to grow concerned about the fact that he can’t smell the bog. There’s a different scent now, cleaner but somehow more like a presence, or perhaps a visitation, which is more unsettling than putrid water.

“Did you any hear weird noises last night?” Techie asks when he’s at the table with Matt, eating instant hotcakes warmed by a porto hydrator that they both felt a little guilty for employing, since it has a limited battery life. 

“I don’t think so.” Matt pauses in mid-chew, frowning. “What did you hear?”

“Nothing, I don’t know-- It was like, like those bird calls? On Jungka? But it didn’t seem to be coming from, um, the sky? More like it was underneath something, like maybe underwater?” 

“Huh.” Matt swallows and gulps from the watered-down ventra juice they’re sharing. “Yeah, that ocean is-- There’s a lot going on there, seems like.”

“A lot,” Techie says with dread, nodding. 

“I could build a ship.” 

“What!” Techie almost laughs, his eyes blown wide and whirring. “No, what-- Like a, like a transport?” 

“Babe.” Matt grins. Techie is annoyed by what seems like Matt’s being amused by his misunderstanding. He feels his face heating. “No, I meant more like a boat, I guess. That’s a better word. Like, for the ocean.” 

“No!” The flush on Techie’s cheeks deepens, but fuck it. He’s not going to be swayed about this. “No way in ha-- _hell_ are you taking some kind of handmade dingy out on that ocean! Like, like-- Why would you tempt fate like that?” 

“I don’t mean right away. I mean once we’ve sussed the situation out a little more. Fishing from a boat is fun.”

“ _Fun_?” 

Techie hears himself getting a little mean, maybe. Matt shrugs and looks down at his almost-gone hotcakes. 

“Never mind,” he mutters. “I guess-- It’s not necessary.” 

“Sorry, just-- Just, that glowing thing we saw out there, like? It was huge, so-- And we have no idea what it’s capable of. How could we-- How could we suss that situation out without encountering that thing, up close, and maybe, you know, being swallowed by it? Teeth or not? I don’t want you to be out on a boat anywhere near that thing, okay? Please?” 

“Okay. Just tell me what to do. I obviously shouldn’t be the one making decisions.” 

Techie isn’t sure if he’s meant to feel chastised by that or if Matt is being earnestly self-deprecating. There wasn’t any real bite in it, and Matt gives him an uncertain smile over the table, which Techie returns, also uncertainly. 

Things are tense between them for the rest of the day. Not _bad_ , just strange. They walk together to the forest of tall, thin trees and take a closer look at them. Knocking on their trunks confirms that they’re hollow, and Matt was right about them being easy to cut down, though they’re so tall and brittle that the work of chopping two of them up and dragging this lumber into the base of the tower takes most of the day. Matt does the physical labor, refusing to let Techie help. Techie is acting as their lookout, Matt says, and this assignment does make sense, though his magnovision can’t cut through the heavy mist that blankets the forest and hangs low over the bog. He thinks of Hux when he puts his eye drops in after showering. 

“How about a noodle bucket for dinner?” Matt says when the sky outside starts to darken. Techie isn’t sure if the days here are short or if he just slept pretty late and then got quickly exhausted. 

“Sounds good!” 

Techie is dressing near the bed, wondering why Matt’s gaze doesn’t linger on his freshly cleaned body like it did when Techie dressed in their room on the _Finalizer_. Even before they were fucking, Techie would catch Matt looking at his ass sometimes. Back then Techie was not infrequently sneaking peeks at Matt’s crotch, trembling with wonder at the visible heft of that bulge in his briefs and wanting to know everything: what Matt’s cock looked like, tasted like, how hot and thick it might feel inside him. He misses that already, but maybe sex is too frivolous a concern, considering the fragility of their still-new existence here. Matt is better than him at knowing what to do in the wilderness. So maybe that boat idea wasn’t completely crazy. Techie has felt awful about criticizing it all day, but also steadfast in his belief that it would be a lunatic move to go exploring on that ocean, overtop those glowing things. And maybe Matt has a point about trusting Techie’s concerns over Matt’s sense of adventure, after all that’s happened.

Too many maybes. Techie is starting to feel shaky from them. He wants to code, misses the sound of his fingers flying over a data console. He thinks of the slow tick of numbers, Matt’s voice as he described the phenomenon, and fears that he’ll never hear either thing again.

But that’s ridiculous, because Matt is here, and for that matter Hux has packed a non-networked data pad in with their things. Techie could code on that, though what he’d be programming he has no idea. 

The noodle bucket smells good, brewing itself to completion on the kitchenette counter. For Techie, self-cooking instafood is a mix of comfort and bad memories, since it’s mostly what he ate in Ma-Ma’s lair, closed up in his safe dark room that wasn’t actually safe at all. He stands at Matt’s side and rubs his back idly while Matt considers some of the spice packets that they should probably reserve for completely unseasoned food. Techie thinks of saying so when Matt tears one open, then bites his tongue. 

Eventually they’ll have to live without spices anyway, he reasons. Unless they find some in the woods, between those tall trees, which is perhaps not unlikely. This place is full of odd smells; some that were far more appealing than that of the bog wafted out of the woods when they were working earlier, carried by the mist when gentle breeze moved through it.

They eat their noodles out of practical black bowls with a glossy finish. Techie is ready for everything that Hux selected to stop tugging at his heart, for no reason: why does it matter that his brother would pick these bowls? That they’re simple but appealing, that he has some kind of _taste_? Techie doesn’t even care about his own taste. He’s never even considered if he has any or not, except when it comes to men. _Has it always been men for you?_ He winces when he bites into an imperfectly hydrated chunk of bilo radish. 

“You okay?” Matt asks. 

“Yes,” Techie says, nodding and stirring his bowl. He thinks of saying nothing more, but if they can’t talk honestly, what the hell will they ever do here? “I just have to, like-- I have to get over some things.”  

“Oh.” Matt looks down into his own bowl, which is empty. He even slurped out the broth, kind of loudly. Techie has seen him do it a million times to his soups in the mess. Somehow it was more charming there. 

“It’s just making me nervous to have to live so close to the ocean,” Techie blurts, because he’s not sure it’s actually time to be honest about anything just yet. And because he’s _not_ regretful, he’s really not. He just can’t make his mind behave, like always. He always sees the worst things, never the good. It’s these fucking eyes. They erase all the things he should appreciate. 

“I won’t let anything out there hurt you.” Matt keeps his eyes lowered; he’s breathing audibly through his nose. “I swear. I know you have no reason to trust me anymore--”

“Don’t say that! I trust you completely, you, you’re--” 

“Right, but. I’m gonna prove it. I’m good for it this time. From now on.” 

Techie just lets his mouth hang open. He’s always been shit at reassuring people; he gave up on it back during his orphanage days, and he’s obviously failing to mend the wounds that are still snagged invisibly all over Matt, much deeper than the healing bruises on his face. Matt is shaken to the very core of himself by what he views as his failure, like Techie was after he lost his eyes. A thing so bad that Matt never thought could happen became real, and he lived to see the other side of it only to realize that he entire galaxy had rearranged itself without his permission. Now the bad thing will always sit there like weight he can’t stop carrying, no matter how many times and ways he tries to put it down and walk away. 

For a moment, Techie thinks he’s going to puke. He gulps watery ventra juice until it passes. 

He keeps waiting to think of the right thing to say while they clean up after dinner and prepare for bed, but if he’s honest himself he’s really just waiting for Matt to say it, or anything. Techie has never said the right things. Even when their lives were on the line, it probably didn’t matter what he did or didn’t say to Hux, who was never going to kill Matt as long as the person who looked like him, or enough like him, with horrible modifications, didn’t want it to happen. Maybe that’s another thing he and Hux have in common: a desperation to belong somewhere, such that they’ll do anything to keep it. The only way that Hux could keep Techie was to let him go.

“It’s just fucking me up a little more than I realized,” Techie blurts when Matt gives him a sad look, standing naked near the bed as if he’s not sure he’s allowed into it. 

“Being here?” Matt says. “With me?”

“No!” Yes, but not for the reasons Matt fears. “It’s-- Thinking about having a, a brother, a twin. It’s like, like-- I look at all this stuff, this stuff he packed, every stupid little thing and I can’t get it out of my head, like. I feel like his _ghost_ or something, living in this surreal life he made up out of all these supplies like, like where _are_ we, you know? This place doesn’t even have a name! Like me, just like me, and so it’s like some kind of, ah. Spiritual waiting room, and that’s what I am, just this-- This half-baked idea of some other person who I don’t even know.” 

Matt scratches at his elbow, where a cut the stormtroopers gave him is still healing. “That makes sense,” he says.

“It _does_?” 

Techie doesn’t think so. He heard it coming out of his mouth and instantly regretted it. Currently he’s fighting the urge to drag a chunk of his hair into his mouth and chew on it like a feral child, something he was berated for at the orphanage until he was forbidden to let his hair grow more than a few inches long. Ironically, or alarmingly, the approximate chunk of hair he usually grabs for is the same one that Hux snipped off to prove their genetic relation.

Matt sits on the bed. Techie moans with relief when Matt gathers him close. He curls up against the heat of Matt’s bare chest, clings and softens in his arms. Blankets are dragged upward, though it’s not cold. Techie burrows into the feeling, hides his face against Matt’s throat and tries to breathe normally. 

“Makes sense to me,” Matt says. His voice is a gentle rumble under Techie’s weight: so good, so welcome, so needed. Techie whimpers and waits to hear how this could possibly be true. “You lose people, but they’re not gone. As soon as they’re nowhere they’re everywhere, too.” 

“But I never-- I never, ah. Had him. He’s just an idea. He was going to kill you!” 

“That doesn’t mean you didn’t recognize him. Or want to. He looks like you. I don’t know what that’s like-- To look at someone else and see yourself. But the kids I grew up with, the ones who got dragged into the stormtrooper program with me, they weren’t my siblings but they were part of me. I looked at them and I saw me, this extension of who I was when we were all still ourselves, at home. Bart and Merri.”

Techie leans back and looks up into Matt’s face when he realizes what those words are. Their names. Matt has never spoken them before. Matt takes a deep breath, his chest sinking below Techie and then inflating again when he exhales. 

“They were always there,” he says. “Until they weren’t. But I still see them in all sorts of things. My mom, too. She taught me how to swim, I can’t-- I can’t look at any ocean or lake or creek and not think of her.” 

“I heard my mother’s voice,” Techie says, whispering. He pets Matt’s cheek; he shaved before dinner and it’s smooth now, smells nice. “In, in that vision that Kylo made me have. Those memories he dragged me back into. She was so scared, Matt, she-- She didn’t want to let us go. Not him or me. She loved us, I felt it, I had-- I had a mother all along, I really did.” 

Matt pulls Techie fully into his arms and they hold each other for a long time, Techie’s leg clamped around Matt’s side, Matt’s breath heavy in Techie’s hair. The night sounds begin outside, and tonight that strange underwater echo seems mournful, but not despairing. Techie almost likes it, when he looks up and understands that Matt is hearing it, too. 

“Whatever’s under there is probably beautiful,” Techie says: meaning the ocean, thinking of that glow. “But it still fucking-- Fucking scares me. I’m sorry.” 

“You never have to be sorry with me.” Matt kisses his face. Techie closes his eyes and grins when they whir and click under the soft pressure of Matt lips, trying to process this sensation that they were not designed to feel. “You can do anything,” Matt says when Techie opens them again. “I’m your-- I’m yours, and I just want to make everything good for you. Especially this place. It’s not such a bad place. Can’t be, if Hux picked it for himself.” 

“He does seem to like nice things,” Techie says, beaming now. It feels good to talk about his brother, the stranger, with someone else who only really knows him as the General. 

They fall asleep still wrapped together, listening to the night sounds that ebb and flow like secret music. Sometimes they’re loud enough to make Techie twitch awake, but it’s not a bad feeling, because tonight Matt wakes up, too, just partially, just enough to nudge Techie and tell him, with nothing more than a low sound at the back of his throat: _I’m here, right here with you, so you’re okay_.

Matt wakes up first: Techie feels it, sometime around dawn. The light through the windows seems different even while his eyes are still mostly closed, brighter, but Matt’s movements beside him are calm, reassuring him that whatever’s happening outside is nothing to worry about. Techie lets himself tumble back down into sleep again, prodding his way back into it curiously, because two nights in a row with no discernable nightmares is a strange phenomenon that even his half-conscious mind is trying to become concerned about.  

One dream does come before he wakes fully, and the images that play behind his eyes feel like they’ve been touched by the light in the room: he follows Hux through a sun-choked corridor, or maybe along a kind of sunbeam itself. Hux speaks in an echoing, far ahead voice, and while Techie can’t quite make out the words he knows he’s being asked to keep up, to hurry along and not fall so far behind that he gets lost in the glow. Techie wants to obey, tries to run, but his legs feel so heavy and tired. In the almost-blinding light he can only really make out Hux’s hair, a halo of red that shines and calls out to him like a reason to stay together, because they have this one thing in common: their appearance, and all its grown out of. This shared history that neither of them knows fully. Techie understands at the very end of the dream that Hux is trying to lead him back to their mother, and he wakes with a gasp. 

Matt is sitting up beside him in bed, looking at something on the data pad. He sets it down when Techie wakes, slides an arm around him. Techie catches his breath and clings to Matt’s thigh, blinking rapidly in the light that fills the room. It’s natural, warm and bright, but so unlike anything they’ve seen for the past few days that it feels wrong. Even the sunlight on Jungka wasn’t this-- lemony? Pure?

“That haze burned off,” Matt explains when Techie blinks up at him, squinting while Matt smoothes his hair back. “Go look, it’s-- You’ll see.” 

Techie moans and flexes against Matt’s side, still not eager to behold new sights. His cock twitches when he casually humps Matt’s leg, but Matt just grins down at the data pad like he doesn’t understand what Techie is asking, which is: will we ever have sex again? 

“What are you doing with that thing?” Techie asks when he sits up and rubs at his eyes. His drops are on the shelf behind the bed; he gropes for them and tilts his head back to apply them. 

“Just seeing what games he loaded on it,” Matt says, showing Techie the screen when his eyes have absorbed the bionic lubrication. “Mostly waiting for you to wake up.” He kisses the tip of Techie’s nose, then nods to the window again. “Go check it out.” 

Techie makes a protesting noise as he climbs over Matt, intentionally dragging as much of his body across Matt’s as he can in the process. He’s wearing only a pair of briefs, which is more than he normally sleeps in. Matt is nude under the blankets, and he readjusts them over his lap while Techie stands and stretches. He’s at least looking at Techie now, eyes grazing down to Techie’s knees and then up to his face again. 

“You’re gonna like it,” Matt says, with a softness that makes Techie nervous.

Techie goes to the window, still squinting. It’s so bright, and he didn’t realize that the red tinge of the sky was brought on by the haze and fog, not the sun itself. At first he doesn’t know what he’s looking at: his heart lurches when it seems like the ocean has disappeared. But it’s still there, just entirely different under this sunlight somehow. It’s a sparkling light green, little white waves cresting in the distance. 

“It changes colors?” Techie says, whirling to Matt to make sure his eyes aren’t lying to him. 

Matt grins. “Yeah,” he says. “Color changing ocean with glowing sea creatures. I bet that’s why Hux picked this as his hideout. Good scenery, never boring. Anyway, I like it. I like it here.” 

Techie has to turn toward the window again, his lips shaking as he feels those words move over them as if they were meant for him, as if this place really is an extension of his seemingly useless but not altogether awful self. And Matt loves both. Techie grips the windowsill and closes his eyes, breathes in deeply. There’s a faint whiff of bog, but without the haze clogging the air there’s also something fresher that seems to come from farther off: it’s like a distant song, like chimes tinkling, only it doesn’t actually make any noise. Techie opens his eyes and lets them readjust to the plentiful sunlight again. The sky above is a very pale blue, cloudless. 

When he turns back, Matt is setting the data pad on the shelf behind the bed. Techie notices then that he brought something else up from the second floor along with it: one of the lube bottles, which catches the light with an obscene glint from within. Techie smirks when he flicks his gaze back to Matt’s. The lube bottles are all the same brand, labeled with straightforward Aurebesh: _Warm Glide (For Love-Making)_. When they were first sorting through the supplies Techie had flushed and shoved the one he examined back into its crate after reading its label, not wanting to think too much about Hux ordering thirty bottles of it, red-faced, with Kylo Ren and exile in mind. 

He goes to the bed and straddles Matt’s lap, swallowing a joyous little noise that might have been a squeak when he settles there and feels Matt getting hard for him under the blanket.

“Hi,” Techie says, placing both hands carefully on Matt’s chest. 

“Hey,” Matt says, so seriously that Techie laughs, then they both do, then they’re kissing, grabbing for each other. Matt is so solid, and the bruises on his face look almost pretty in this light, like evidence of his durability and also of his secret fragile places. Techie loves both, all of him, and he’s glad suddenly to have seen the vulnerable side, too.

“Different from our usual brand,” Techie says when he reaches for the lube, unable to wait any longer. 

“Probably better.” 

“Mhmm, yeah, well. Let’s find out.” 

Techie watches Matt slick his fingers, his breath shortening with excitement as he feels his muscles going loose, the tension leaving his shoulders. He wants to fuck sweaty and sloppy, all day long, to roll around in this bed until it reeks of them. The new lube smells good, like some kind of expensive and rare fruit. Techie moans and arches his back as Matt slides his fingers down to slick him with it, and tries to spread his thighs more widely when Matt feels him in slow, indulgent circles before pressing one fingertip inside. 

“You don’t have to be so careful,” Techie says, grinning and letting his eyes fall shut, his head resting on Matt’s shoulder. Their chests are stuck together with sweat, and Techie is glad for this: it eases his way as he rubs his cock against Matt’s hard stomach. 

“Can I, though?” Matt asks. He at least slides his finger in more deeply, and Techie opens his lips against Matt’s skin, lets him feel how wet his mouth has gotten.

“Can-- Can you?”

“Be careful, uh. Can I go slow? Or do you need it too bad?”

Techie laughs and flushes, squirms back to get more of Matt’s finger into him before lifting his face. Matt’s glasses are already fogging up. 

“I need it pretty-- pretty bad,” Techie says, murmuring this against Matt’s open mouth. “But if you want to make me, like, even more crazy for it, um. That could be good, too.” 

Within this leisurely pace there are bouts of greedy desperation, Techie bouncing on Matt’s fingers and whining, Matt thrusting his cock up against Techie’s ass without any pretense of finesse. Despite these frantic interludes it seems to take ages to actually get Matt inside him, and Techie has already come all over Matt’s chest from extended prostate teasing by the time he’s seating himself on Matt’s cock, still loopy and moaning from his orgasm, Matt’s hands spread open on Techie’s back as he goes almost entirely liquid with the relief of being filled so deeply, stretched so wide. 

“You look so pretty when you ride me,” Matt says when Techie bounces on him, drowsy and rhythmless, mouth open.  

“Pretty?” Techie smirks and shakes his head, lets his hair flip onto his face and stick against his damp cheeks. He laughs low in his stomach when Matt sits up a little, so he can Techie’s reach face and sweep his hair back. 

“Yeah,” Matt says, his voice throaty, eyes serious. “That’s what-- unh, _yeah_. What I said.” 

“How can you even, ahhh, see me--” 

Techie takes Matt’s foggy glasses off and pauses in his bouncing, moaning at the stretch against his rim when he leans forward to put them on the shelf behind the bed. Matt moves his hands across Techie’s back and sighs, and for a while they stay like that, breathing deeply and absorbing the feeling of their connection. Techie squeezes up around Matt in involuntary little pulses, gasping at the width of him as if it’s new. He still can’t get over it, even after hundreds of fucks: how perfectly Matt fills him, how good this feels, how he at last has something that feels like it could only ever belong to him. He clings to Matt’s shoulders and gives him slobbering kisses, first on his throat and then on his lips. 

“Needed you,” Techie says, mumbling this into Matt’s mouth. 

“Mhmm, well, you got me. Feels so fucking good, baby.” 

Techie snorts at this evolution of _babe_ , wondering if it will stick. He wouldn’t mind, would never object to any names Matt wants to give him. He’s getting hard again, twitching his hips in lazy bounces while Matt just stares up at him with worshipful patience, petting his sides and pinching his nipples. 

“I love your hands,” Techie says, capturing one. He’s said this a million times, and not always during sex. He sucks on one of Matt’s fingers, then two, watching Matt’s awed expression and listening to the way his breath comes quicker when Techie flicks his tongue at the webbing between his fingers, a particularly sensitive spot. “Hey, um, buh-- babe?” Techie says when Matt’s wet fingers are curled at the corner of his lips. Daring this nickname makes him tighten up nervously around Matt, whose eyes widen a little. 

“Yeah?” 

“Could you, could-- Could you fuck me hard, I need it _ha_ \--hard, need you--” 

Matt grunts and nods. He supports Techie’s back as he moves onto his knees, lowering Techie down onto the bed and looming over him, still inside him. Techie feels wild and greedy, always asking for something, wanting more, but he knows Matt is glad to give it. Matt pulls out almost all the way before snapping in hard, and groans with what sounds like a kind of filthy wonder when Techie shouts and tightens his legs around Matt’s sides, bracing himself. 

“Like that?” Matt asks, growling the words out as if he already knows the answer, because of course he does. Techie nods madly, squirms.

“Like that, yes, yeah-- yeah, _unnnh_ , yes, oh--” 

Any semblance of language and rational thought dissolves, and Techie is quickly close to coming again just from being fucked hard, every blunt thrust of Matt’s cock against his prostate bringing a noise out of him that might be frightening to the native wildlife. Matt knows exactly how to hold him when he wants it like this, the right angle and pace and the right noises to make in response: low sounds of guttural praise that reverberate through Techie the way Matt’s voice does at bedtime, a kind of foundational reassurance that everything is in hand, especially Techie’s trembling, sweat-slick body as he nears another orgasm. 

“Gonna come in you,” Matt says, his teeth scraping softly against Techie’s shoulder. Matt’s breath is so hot, and his cock is so fucking thick, so deep. “You want, _nnh_ \-- You want that, baby? My big fucking load, want it in you?”

“Yes!” Techie has possibly never been more emphatic about anything; his throat is raw already from screaming. Even in their sound-sealed room in the _Finalizer_ , he was never this loud. It’s as if he’s putting some kind of mark on the place: just audibly, no real harm done, but the volume of his pleasure seems meaningful, like planting a flag here. “Puh, please, please, put it in me, in me, I need it--” 

Matt makes Techie come first, fisting his cock until he screams and spurts weakly against Matt’s hot palm. When Matt comes it’s with a kind of vibration that starts in Matt’s chest and moves into Techie’s, rattling his ribs and pulsing along his limbs as he clings to Matt, to this feeling. They stay wrapped around each other for a long time, though the room now feels sweltering hot. 

Lying on top of the blankets afterward, they only touch each other’s faces, allowing the sweat to cool on their skin and the soft breeze through the open windows to move over them. Techie draws his fingertip down the length of Matt’s nose, then over his puffy lips, which are still open around his breath as it calms and steadies. 

“Let’s stay here all day,” Techie says, whispering, as if there’s someone around they they need to hide from, someone who wouldn’t approve of such a lazy afternoon. 

“Sure,” Matt says. He scoots closer, gropes for Techie’s knee and holds it against his stomach. “You don’t want to go outside at all though? It’s, you know. A nice day.” 

“There will be other nice days,” Techie says, determined to spend this one in bed with Matt. He’s just beginning to understand how good it feels to have no place to be, no orders to follow or tasks to complete. 

“You sure about that?” Matt asks. He winks so Techie will know he’s only teasing. “We don’t know about this planet. This might be the one nice day per annual cycle.” 

“If it is, ah-- I still want to be right here, during it.” 

“Mhm, me too.” 

Techie moves into Matt’s arms, though they’re both still overly warm. They tangle their legs together and laugh against each other’s cheeks. Techie isn’t even sure what’s funny: all of it, or nothing in particular: just that they’re here at all, that this moment exists and belongs only to them. He’s laughing at least in part at the suggestion that there will be a shortage of nice days here. He knows there will be so many, and that someday soon it will knock him on his ass to even try to count them all up, because his gratitude is already so enormous, so impossible to measure that it takes his breath away. 

 

**

 

Ren considers landing on the other side of the bamstock forest, then decides it would be pointless. They’ll have seen the ship already, and it’s not as if they’ve got long range weapons, unless that bow counts, and three years is plenty of time to have lost all the arrows. 

Though maybe it’s also long enough to have recovered a few. 

“Should we wave some kind of white flag?” Ren asks when he powers the shuttle down, as if Hux will know. 

One look of simmering hatred from Hux tells him that he shouldn’t have mentioned white flags just yet, or maybe ever. 

“Wave whatever you want,” Hux says. “This is your brilliant fucking _plan_. We were probably tracked here. If my brother is captured along with us because of your reckless--”

“Shut up,” Ren snaps, though he vowed not to be cruel to Hux during this rescue mission, especially when he’s asking for it. Of course he’s trying to re-establish that things were ruined once; of course he still blames Ren. “We weren’t tracked. I’d know.” 

He doesn’t add: and this was really your plan, the one you made years ago, not mine. Hux is in denial about a number of things at the moment, including that. 

“So,” Ren says when Hux just sits against the back wall of the shuttle, curled in on himself and trying not to wince too noticeably. “I guess you’ll need help--”

“I won’t. Just-- Get back! Give me some bloody space.”

“Your foot--”

“It’s my ankle, and it’s only a sprain. I don’t suppose you have bacta?”

Ren huffs in disbelief at the question. Hux snarls at him. His cheek is bleeding, and between that and the prison haircut he looks insane. 

“I don’t have anything,” Ren says, more sharply than he probably should have. “And neither do you. That’s why we’re here. You can’t walk on a sprained ankle, anyway.” 

“Like hell I can’t.”

Hux grits his teeth and slaps his palm against the wall of the shuttle. He closes his eyes as he pulls himself up, putting all his weight on his left leg while his right foot tentatively tests at the floor with the toe of his boot, which is busted open, revealing a hole-filled sock. 

Ren goes to Hux when he tries to hobble, unable to stop himself. He’s met with Hux’s thrashing arm, which strikes him with surprising strength. 

“Ow,” Ren says, though it didn’t actually hurt. Not physically, anyway. 

“I said stay clear!” Hux is red-faced, from shame or exertion. Ren doesn’t dare try to read his thoughts. Hux would feel it and hate him for it. 

Though maybe Hux already hates him. Without spying on his thoughts with the Force, Ren can’t tell if this is an act or not. 

“Just let me help you,” Ren says, not trying to hide the shake in his voice. Maybe emphasizing it a little. “For fuck’s sake, Hux. It’s like you’re not even happy to see me.”

That was supposed to be a joke, sort of. Hux makes a grumbling protest under his breath and keeps moving slowly along the wall of the transport, toward the open hatch. He’s still gripping the wall as best he can with his sweaty palm and is only putting occasional wincing pressure on his right leg, mostly hopping along on the left one.

“Forgive my inability to be happy about anything right now,” Hux says. “You may not have noticed, but this is the pathetic end of my life.” 

“But your brother-- You’ll get to see Techie.” 

Ren can feel Techie and Matt at the door of the old radar tower, their fright and confusion reaching out through the Force. While Hux continues with his stubborn game, Ren walks down the ramp of the shuttle so they’ll see him and be reassured that they’re not in danger. Hopefully.

He can only see Matt at first, then Techie peeks out from over Matt’s shoulder. Ren waves with his hand, lacking a white flag. They don’t wave back, but they also don’t fire any arrows. 

“You’re really not going to let me help you down the ramp?” Ren asks, turning back toward Hux, who still hasn’t even made it to the top of the exit hatch. “They probably think you’re dead. That I’m here to notify next of kin.” 

Hux says nothing, and without reaching out with the Force Ren can feel something breaking in him: physical pain, mental exhaustion, a sense of loss so desperate and sucking that even someone who wasn’t Force sensitive would probably feel it. Hux makes a noise under his breath and crumples against the wall. He’s got his head tucked to his chest when Ren hurries to him. He reaches out and thrashes at Ren with his arm again, weakly this time. 

“Hey, hey,” Ren says, hearing Han Solo in this worthless reassurance. His hands go to Hux’s shoulders the way they used to, when they touched each other behind closed doors. “Look, we’re here, we’re alive. Safe for now. Your brother is going to be happy to see you. That’s all I meant by that, uh. Next of kin comment. A joke, right? Hux?”

Hux makes a half-buried sobbing sound and sucks in a wet breath, hiding his face from Ren. His hands are shaking, balled up in fists over his eyes. 

“I don’t want him to see me like this,” Hux says. His voice sounds like it’s coming from someplace underground, collapsed and tiny. 

Ren can hear footsteps across the rocks now: Matt is coming, Techie following. 

“I know,” Ren says. “But he won’t care. Trust me.”

Hux laughs darkly at that suggestion. 

Matt arrives at the end of the shuttle’s ramp. He’s angry that they’re here, worried, but curious. Techie hangs back. He’s somehow wearing one of Ren’s old shirts, which is huge on him and hanging over his hands. So that’s weird. 

“You’re back,” Matt says when Ren fails to come up with a good opening line, too preoccupied with the fact that Hux is still curled against the shuttle wall, shaking pretty hard. 

“Yeah,” Ren says. “We need to, uh. Crash with you guys. For a while. I’m sure you’ll have no objections.” 

He’s not using a mind trick, just calling in a favor. Matt turns to look at Techie, then beckons him forward. 

“Hux is inside,” Matt says. 

Techie exhales with what sounds like relief and runs to the shuttle, stopping at the end of the ramp and peering up at Ren uncertainly. Techie’s hair is shorter than Ren remembers it being, a few inches shy of brushing his shoulders. His eyes seem fully functional. The old brand mark on his forehead has faded even more, but it’s still there. 

Ren feels something heavy settle in his gut. An old fear, from when he was younger and more selfish. He lets go of Hux’s shoulders, steps back. 

“Come on,” Ren says to Techie. “He needs you, hurry up.” 

Techie walks up the ramp, still moving cautiously. Hux lifts his face as if he recognizes his twin’s footsteps. He’s not crying, but he’s very pale, scratched up and sad-looking, like a weatherbeaten stray that used to be somebody’s pet. 

Or maybe that’s just Ren projecting. 

“Oh!” Techie drops to his knees when he sees Hux, reaches for him and then pulls his hands back. He looks up at Ren. “What-- What happened?”

“Don’t ask _him_ ,” Hux snaps, frowning. He drags himself forward, closer to Techie, who reaches again and rests one hand very gently on Hux’s shoulder this time. 

Ren wonders if it’s the first time they’ve touched, aside from when Hux was manhandling Techie in the interrogation chair. But of course it’s not the first time: they shared a womb. Probably a crib, too, until they were separated.

For a while they just stare at each other, Techie’s bottom lip trembling with whatever he wants to say. Hux’s face is very still. He doesn’t even blink. Matt observes all of this from the middle of the ramp, silent and projecting increasing concern that Ren and Hux will ruin the life he and Techie have built here.

“I hurt my ankle,” Hux says, as if that’s the whole story. “Would you-- Help me stand, please.” 

“Your-- Yes, yeah, of course! Which, which one--”

“The right one is sprained, just-- Here, give me your arm.” 

_Give me your arm_. Hux once joked, when he was trying to pretend that being rejected by his twin hadn’t crushed some last delicate thing he’d hidden within himself, that he should have kept Techie around for spare parts, in case the great General should need some. 

Hux and Techie make their way toward the tower slowly. Ren trails behind them, falling in step with Matt, whose suspicion and annoyance are like a foul odor. There’s a more literal foul odor coming from the nearby bog, the air stagnant and thick with a cloudy red mist that makes Ren sneeze. 

“Were you in a battle?” Matt asks when they’re halfway to the tower, Hux limping along with Techie’s help. 

“A few,” Ren says. 

“How’s, uh. How’s the war going?”

“How do you know about the war?” 

Matt shrugs. He’s alarmed, caught. They’ve had visitors here. Ren sniffs the air as if he can smell them, though the presence doesn’t feel particularly recent. 

“It’s very stupid to have contact with the outside world,” Ren says, keeping his voice low. Hux doesn’t need any additional stress right now. “In your position.”

“We didn’t mean to,” Matt says, mumbling. “They’re just Traders. They showed up, and--” 

“I know what Traders are and what they do. Don’t mention it to Hux.” 

Matt nods. He looks good, healthy, and so does Techie, so they must be eating well. Over the years, Ren has occasionally searched the Force for information about them. He’s always received a kind of bland, nondescript assurance that they were safe, static, peaceful and far away.

“What’s all this?” Ren asks, gesturing to the structure Matt has built around the tower with bamstock wood. 

“Just, you know. Like, porches.” 

“Mhm.” 

Ren is impressed, actually. There are three levels of outdoor balconies circling the tower, all of them covered with bamstock shingle awnings. They’ve also built a dock on the rocky coast out of the same materials, and a little boat that sways against the calm tide, tied to the dock with what looks like standard-issue First Order durafiber rope. 

“You gonna tell us what happened?” Matt asks as he and Ren watch Techie help Hux into the tower, out of the mist. 

“Maybe later,” Ren says. “Get in there and help them up the stairs.” 

Matt gives Ren a look that seems to ask why Ren, wielder of the Force, isn’t just levitating Hux around. Ren glares at him. Matt turns for the tower without voicing that question or any others. 

Ren curses when he walks into the bottom floor of the tower, because there’s no way to hide the fact that Traders have been here: wall hangings and cushions abound, plus more substantial furnishings, lanterns, and all sorts of things that don’t resemble anything packed into those crates Hux once stocked for the worst case scenario of his own emergency departure. 

“What the hell have you been trading?” Ren asks, looking around at the fine wares while Hux attempts the stairs with only Techie’s help, struggling. “It better not be information,” Ren says, lowering his voice and looming into Matt’s space.

“No,” Matt says, holding his ground. As if this place is his ground to hold; as if it’s not a gift that Ren gave him once. 

“Ren, will you just do this for me!” Hux shouts, red-faced and attempting a kind of half-crawl up the stairs while Techie hovers behind him fretfully. 

Ren uses the Force to lift Hux into the air. He does it as gently as he can, but Hux still gasps, no longer accustomed to the sensation. 

“Move aside,” Ren says to Techie, keeping his face impassive. As if his heart isn’t soaring for having been asked to help in the way that only he can.

He stays close to Hux, almost touching him as he uses the Force to carefully guide him up to the second floor, which is even more lavishly decorated. If Hux is upset about this, he makes no indication. Perhaps this is not the time. Ren moves Hux toward a large sofa-like thing that might be handmade; the frame is bamstock wood. It’s piled with cushions that are embroidered with rich patterns from far off lands, the kind of stuff Traders peddle. As he settles Hux onto the cushions, Ren wonders if he even knows what Traders are. Ren is familiar with them through his father. Han called them ‘ghost Jawas’ with some degree of seriousness. He was a little bit afraid of their ability to slip through the cracks of every tightly monitored society and far flung outpost. 

“Have you got bacta?” Ren asks, turning from Hux to Matt and Techie. They’re lingering near the stairs, looking at Ren like he’s a ghost who has appeared to haunt their pleasant cottage.

“Yeah!” Techie rushes toward the staircase that leads toward the third floor. “I’ll get some, um, we have patches and ointment, which-- Which do you use for a sprain?”

“Ointment,” Hux says, at the same time that Ren says, “A patch.” 

“I’ll, um-- I’ll get both!” 

Techie bolts up the stairs. Ren looks at Hux, who won’t meet his eyes. 

“Bring a clean cloth, too,” Ren shouts. “Some water, and an anti-infectant stim, if you’ve got one.” 

“We’re not quite that well-stocked,” Matt says. 

“I don’t need a stim anyway,” Hux says. He’s arranging himself on the sofa, shifting and frowning at the embroidered cushions. “Did you two acquire a transport somehow?” he asks.

“No,” Matt says. “We’ve been here the whole time. Well--” He glances at Ren, who gives him a look that tells him to shut up. “Never mind.”

“Then how--” Hux mutters. He shakes his head and rubs a hand over his face, hissing when this pulls at the cut on his cheek, which had finally begun to clot.

“Careful,” Ren says. 

Hux glares at him, blood dripping down toward his jaw again like a threat.

Techie returns with the bacta and helps Hux roll his pant leg up. He puts a smear of the ointment on, and Hux doesn’t protest when Techie adds the bacta pad overtop it. 

“Who hurt you?” Techie asks, speaking softly. He’s kneeling beside the sofa, peering up at Hux as if he’s a disturbing vision of his own future. 

“The First Order,” Hux says. “Snoke.” 

“You were overthrown?” Matt says. 

“Demoted. Ages ago. Well, a year ago. I don’t suppose you two heard about Starkiller.”

Matt and Techie glance at each other. Of course they heard. Traders spread not just wares but news all over the galaxy. For that matter, Matt and Techie might have a transmitting network set up here by now, reckless bastards that they are.

“We heard,” Techie says. “It, um. The five planets, and then. It blew up, too.”

“It blew up, too,” Hux says very flatly, staring at the bacta pad on his ankle. “Yes, that’s what you can put on my memorial stone, if I’ll even have one. Maybe here, overlooking that slime pit outside. Seems fitting.”

Silence descends. Matt shuffles, crosses his arms over his chest and then uncrosses them. 

“How about some food?” Ren’s voice seems to bellow, but he doesn’t care. Hux is despairing, wilting, giving up. 

“Sure,” Matt says. “I’ll make something.” 

“I’ll, uh, I’ll help!” Techie hops up, still staring at Hux. “Are you okay?” he asks. 

Hux doesn’t seem to hear the question, or maybe he just doesn’t want to respond. He’s holding the cloth Techie brought down with the bacta, and a glass of water that he hasn’t sipped from yet.

“Go,” Ren says. “Prepare a meal for him. Something bland but hearty.” 

Matt moves toward the stairs and Techie follows, glancing back at Hux as if he’s afraid to take his eyes off him for fear he’ll disappear again. Ren recognizes that look, knows the feeling. 

“What is this?” Hux mutters, sniffing at the glass of water when they’re gone. “Smells like death. They expect me to drink this?”

“It’s just mineral deposits. The smell isn’t that bad, and you know it won’t hurt you. Here, give it to me.” 

Ren takes the glass and sits on the sofa beside Hux, crowding him. He snatches the cloth from Hux’s other hand and wets it in the glass before bringing it to Hux’s jaw and cleaning away the blood that’s dried there: first the most recent streak, then older ones. He works slowly, trying not to pull at the cut and not to pay too much attention to the way Hux’s breath has quickened. 

“Careful,” Hux says now, meeting Ren’s eyes when he begins to clean around the edges of the cut itself. 

“I know,” Ren mutters, not even sure what he’s trying to say. He uses the Force to grab the bacta ointment from the floor, opens it and puts a small amount on his finger. 

Hux holds his breath while Ren gently brushes his bacta-covered finger over the cut, watching as it begins to knit back together beneath the shine of the ointment. It’s a shallow cut, will disappear completely after a few hours of treatment. Ren killed the prisoner who did it, the first life he’s taken since Snoke’s. When Hux finally lets himself exhale, he’s holding Ren’s gaze, his cheek twitching under the tingle of the bacta. 

“Well,” Hux says. He swallows; he must be so thirsty. “I mean, thank you,” he says, pronouncing those last two words with more than a little sarcasm. His lips are dry and cracked and his hair has been clumsily shorn by some prison droid, but he looks better than he ever has to Ren, like a lost paradise glowing behind a gate that keeps Ren out, though he is halfway to kissing Hux already, staring at his lips. 

“Rey wanted me to go home with her,” Ren says, dragging his gaze back up to Hux’s eyes. “After we killed Snoke. She didn’t understand why I wouldn’t, didn’t think I had anything left in the galaxy except her invitation to go crawling back to Luke. I told her I had to go deeper into the fortress, alone. That Snoke kept my heart in a glass jar and I had to get it back.” 

Hux’s eyebrows lift slightly. Then his nose twitches, and his lip.

“A glass jar,” he says, scoffing. “I wasn’t nearly important enough to have that sort of cage.” 

“Mhm, you don’t think so? Do you know what a holocron is?”

Hux looks away, then back at Ren’s face. He doesn’t like admitting that he doesn’t know everything. Ren fights the urge to smirk; he’s just so glad this is still true.

“It sounds familiar,” Hux says. “I’ve-- Heard the term.” 

“Sith Lords used them for all sorts of things, including trapping information that they wanted to hoard for themselves. Do you think I didn’t search for you, after I left my training?” 

“How was I to know you’d left it? I was rotting in a backwater prison like a petty criminal. It must have been public record, at least within the Order--”

“No. Snoke knew I would seek you out. I tried, I searched the Force for any hint of you. I couldn’t even determine if you were dead or alive. He’d locked the truth about you into a holocron. He had more than one-- I had to destroy eighteen of them before the secret about you was released. I was choking on all the dark things swirling out of the others, but I couldn’t stop--”

There are footsteps on the stairs. It’s Techie, carrying a plate of something that smells good. Bearing food, he looks more cheerful, like he’s decided this family visit won’t doom him. 

“That was fast,” Ren says, annoyed by the interruption. He remains seated on the couch, close to Hux.

“Yeah, um, this is my favorite, it’s-- It’s mushrooms, like, five different kinds, just fried up with-- That’s a yellow egg, there in the middle, and then this is just some bread, you can use it to sort of scoop everything up or you can-- Here’s a fork--”

“He knows how to eat,” Ren says, taking the plate. “Thank you,” he adds when Techie wilts and steps away, hands behind his back. 

“Yes, this looks ideal,” Hux says. He grabs the plate from Ren. “Might I ask what sort of creature laid this egg, though?”

“Oh, just a bird! We call them yellow birds, uh. ‘Cause they’re yellow. Not sure what the technical term is for, like, anything here, really.” 

“You’ve obviously thrived here in some fashion,” Hux says, glancing around at the decor. He sounds only partially judgmental. “I suppose I knew you would, considering what else you’ve been through. Well done.” 

Hux rips off a hunk of the bread and pushes mushrooms onto it with the fork, dragging some egg yolk along as well. He takes a bite and looks at Techie, eyebrows lifting, then at Ren. 

“This is actually very good,” he says, still chewing. “Ren, have some.” 

The offer to eat from Hux’s plate shouldn’t fill Ren with victorious glee: Hux should be groveling at Ren’s feet after all he’s done for him, even if the ankle injury was Ren’s fault. But he can’t deny that sharing a plate of food with Hux feels like the most sacred intimacy he’s been offered in years.   

Ren takes the fork, trying to remember the last time he ate with one. Aboard the _Finalizer_ , maybe, with Hux across from him at that little table in his quarters. He stabs some mushrooms and almost moans at how good they taste. He hasn’t had what he considers to be real food since before what he now thinks of the worst year of his life. The year Starkiller was fired. 

“I’m glad you like it,” Techie says. He’s sort of walking in place, lifting one foot and then the other, smiling just at the corner of his mouth. Matt has returned from the third floor and is sitting on the stairs, observing the scene with a pensive caution that Ren can’t help but respect. He would be suspicious, too, and afraid to lose this little respite at the end of the known galaxy. 

“I’m sure you have questions,” Hux says, scraping egg yoke up along with a fork full of mushrooms. “Chief among them I assume is whether or not Ren and I are bringing danger to your door by being here. I would first remind you that this is in fact my door, despite my lacking a rank in the Order at present. I have considered this place on loan to you these past three years, and if you have feelings to the contrary I’d further remind you that Ren at least is still loyal to me and that no amount of resistance to our being here would hold a candle to his powers.”

Ren withholds a groan and swipes a hunk of bread from Hux’s plate. Of course Hux is opening with a threat, after he’s been fed and bandaged by their hosts. He did the same when Ren yanked him from that hell pit of a prison on Ubani. Hux is one of those animals that tries to make itself look bigger when it’s backed into a corner, hissing and spitting and praying he’ll scare someone while his little heart pounds.

“But at present,” Hux continues, “According to our best information, which is to say Ren’s ability to sense such things, none of us is in danger here, and we mean you no harm. We’re merely in need of a place to lodge while we formulate the next-- Our next-- While we figure out what to do next, that is.” 

“We heard the Order’s falling apart,” Matt says. It’s not a friendly statement. 

Hux looks up from his plate and shrugs. “Of course it is,” he says. “In my absence.”

“And mine,” Ren says.

Hux rolls his eyes. Ren tries not to take it personally. It’s true that he never really cared about the Order or their rules, but the entire organization benefited from his talents, at times. 

“I don’t know if what’s become of the Order is salvageable,” Hux says. As if on a whim he might stride back into the fray and bring all the threads together with a few wise moves. Ren has seen Hux in a prison riot, thrashing in the middle of utter chaos. He held his own while Ren unlatched the mechanism that had yanked Hux’s ankle out of sync when Ren tried to simply pluck him from the crowd unseen, but only for a short time. He’d needed Ren’s help after the initial scrum, and wouldn’t have lasted much longer on his own within that rioting mass of violence. And it’s unlikely that the First Order is much more than a rioting mass of violence now, lacking the leadership of both Snoke and Hux. Ren has investigated it only idly. He was only really interested in freeing Rey, defeating Snoke, and reclaiming Hux. 

When Hux has cleaned his plate, Techie takes it back upstairs. Ren asks Matt for a tour of the surrounding area, wanting to have a private word with him while Hux rests. Hux seems like he might protest this plan, but then Techie comes back downstairs with clean clothes for Hux to change into, and the two of them launch into a quiet, brotherly conversation that Ren strains to hear as he’s leaving with Matt. 

“You know that’s my shirt,” Ren says when they’re walking along the coast, Matt mostly keeping quiet in a way that once seemed difficult for him, when they worked out together onboard the _Finalizer_. 

Matt looks down at his chest and nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Hux packed your stuff, too.” 

“Not sure when he had time to ransack my things on your behalf.” 

“I think--” Matt glances at Ren like he’s not sure he should say more. “Uh, I mean, we assumed he’d packed these a while ago. When he was planning for his own escape. So you could go with him.” 

That seems impossible, but maybe it’s more likely than Hux scrambling at the last second to make sure Matt was well accounted for. Though he did have those glasses made. 

“We fell out after you two left,” Ren says. It feels stupid to voice this, but Matt once hung on his every word, and who else is he ever going to tell? “Me and Hux,” he says when Matt gives him a confused look. 

“How come?”

“I’m not a good liar. At least not when I’m trying to lie to him. He could tell that I’d sensed something about Techie years ago and kept it from him. He was already pretty fucked up about the whole thing, after you guys left. About losing his brother after they’d been onboard the same ship all that time. When he finally got me to admit that I’d known something he, uh. Lost his shit and threw me out. Not that we were living together, but. You know.” 

“Why did you keep it from him in the first place?” 

“‘Cause I thought he wouldn’t need me anymore, if he had a brother around.” 

“Oh.” Matt stops walking and looks out at the ocean, which is dark and calm, eerily watchful. He turns back to Ren and adjusts his glasses. “Isn’t that kind of, like, stupid?”

“Yes.” Ren resists the urge to shove Matt of the rocky ledge they’re standing on, into the water. “I realize that now.” He realized a lot of things, post-Starkiller. Post-bridge.

“But now you’re back together?” Matt says, looking toward the tower like he’s not sure he trusts Hux in there alone with Techie. 

“I was barred from accessing Hux in any form by Snoke, through the Force. It’s complicated, so I won’t attempt to explain.” He already regrets his attempt to explain it to Hux. _Heart in a glass jar_ had seemed like such a perfect, winning phrase when it was still turning over and over in his head, on the way to the Ubani prison. “I’ve found him again because I defeated Snoke,” he says, though there are so many ways in which it’s not that simple. “Hux still harbors anger toward me, however. He’s also mourning the loss of his career. You might say he’s in denial about the fact that it’s over. Don’t repeat any of this to Techie,” Ren says as an afterthought, almost sealing this command with a mind trick. If Matt tells Techie, Hux will find out. Surely that’s how all twins work, even those who are reunited later in life. Luke and Leia shared information about Ben in this way. 

“You can confide in me, man,” Matt says. He seems sincere, and Ren resists the urge to Force-check him. He’s trying to do that less often in general. “I know it’s not easy. Me and Techie fight sometimes.” 

“Really?” 

“Sure. We fought about that.” Matt points to the little boat that’s tied to the nearby dock. “He didn’t want me to make it.” 

“But you did.”

“Well, yeah. About a year after we fought about it. After I’d taught him to swim.” 

Ren turns away from Matt, feeling a surge of irrational, searing jealousy. The idea of teaching Hux how to do anything is intoxicating. Hux would never allow it. Rebuilding even the most basic trust between them might take years, but Hux did let Ren touch his face and eat from his plate. It’s more than Ren expected when they were first aboard the shuttle, when Hux was berating him for the pain in his ankle even as Ren whisked him away from prison, to safety. 

“Was it hard to kill Snoke?” Matt asks, apparently done with talk about relationships. 

“I had help,” Ren admits. He wonders where Rey is now. Back with Luke, or with Finn, or any of the many others who love her. “Finding Hux was harder. I had to do that alone, I had to-- Fight through traps Snoke had set for me.”  

“He’d sent Hux to prison?”

“Yeah, a really dismal one in the Outer Rim.” Ren is actually impressed that Hux is as intact as he is, after over a year there. “He was storing Hux there in case he needed to use him as leverage against me. But Snoke became more interested in manipulating my cousin, and Hux just got left to rot, forgotten.” 

“I’m glad he’s okay,” Matt says. “Techie never forgot him.” 

Ren almost says _neither did I_ , but Matt isn’t accusing him of having forgotten Hux, even if that’s more or less what Snoke attempted to engineer with that holocron. That Snoke had been powerful enough to make Ren forget how to find Hux feels like an insult that endures even now that Snoke is dead. _You care about this more than anything?_ Snoke had asked, without speaking, by creating that holocron. _Then why can I hold it out of your reach?_

When they return to the tower, Ren braces himself to see Hux and Techie weeping together, arms around each other as they look up at him like he’s an intruding stranger. Instead he finds Hux fast asleep on the sofa, a blanket draped over his legs. He’s wearing a soft tunic that Ren doesn’t recognize from his old wardrobe. Maybe Techie got it from a Trader over the years; maybe he gave his brother his best shirt as a welcome gift. 

There are sounds from the third floor: cooking or cleaning or some other kind of hostly busy work. Matt goes up to see what Techie is doing while Ren lingers on the second floor to watch Hux sleep. There’s a large lantern in the corner, casting a warm glow on Hux’s face while he rests, his lips just slightly open like they always were when Ren watched him in bed. 

Ren waits until the noises from upstairs have quieted. The shower is running, and otherwise the whole tower has gone still. In the distance he can hear the hollow trunks of the bamstock trees thunking together against the occasional gust of wind. The ocean makes almost no noise, aside from knocking the little boat into the dock. Hux’s breathing is quiet when Ren lowers himself slowly onto the floor, kneeling beside the sofa. 

The smear of bacta ointment on Hux’s cheek has dried up, and the cut is pink and puffy, half-healed. Ren picks up the tube of ointment and squeezes another thin stream of it onto his finger. He takes a deep breath and holds it as he reaches for Hux’s face, moving his fingertip as softly as he can over the cut as he reapplies the ointment. Hux’s cheek flinches under Ren’s touch, then his eyebrows twitch together. He makes a soft noise and blinks his heavy-lidded eyes open just enough to see who is looming over him. 

“Thought your instincts would be better,” Ren says: the wrong thing, of course. As usual.

“What?” Hux’s voice is hoarse, his brow still pinched. 

“Just from-- Prison. Never mind.”

“I knew it was you.” Hux rolls onto his back and stretches, arching in a way that makes Ren’s mouth water. “I always knew,” he mumbles when his eyes fall shut again. “When you’d watch me sleep.”

“You did not.” It’s impossible. The Force would have told Ren so. 

“Tell yourself whatever you like, Ren. It’s all in the past now.” 

Ren aches to say something that will call Hux back to him. The heart in the glass jar bit fell flat, but at least Hux isn’t telling him to leave him alone. He’s letting Ren linger so close. He must feel Ren’s breath on his face, and he must not mind it, since he’s not pushing him away. 

“Did you talk with Techie?” Ren asks. 

“A bit.” Hux pulls the blankets up to his chest, eyes still closed. 

“They’re wearing my old clothes.” Maybe Ren can at least get Hux to admit that he wanted him here once. That he planned for it. 

“I hardly believed you when you said you were taking me here,” Hux says. “That they would still be here, just as we left them. Better off, actually.” 

“We could be better off, too,” Ren says, blurting this out before he can think better of it.

Hux peeks at him and gives him a grumpy, scrutinizing look. “What?” 

“We’re free agents now. We can decide what to do next. Together. Maybe it will be better than when we tried to attach ourselves to grander schemes.” 

“Let me sleep before you talk to me of schemes.” Hux closes his eyes again, still frowning. “And don’t sit there staring at me the whole time, please.”  

You could move over, Ren almost says. He opens his mouth to ask if Hux would be willing to share this sofa with him the way he shared his food, then clamps his lips shut when he hears footsteps on the stairs. They’re soft, cautious: Techie’s. 

“Oh, um--” Techie pauses on the stairs, taking hold of the hatch above him. “Are you-- Do you need anything, is-- Is Armitage okay?” 

Ren can’t help but make a face at the sound of that name. Hux hates it, of course. But when Ren glances at him he’s smiling a little. 

“I’m fine,” Hux says before Ren can answer for him. “Just trying to get some rest. Maybe you could entertain Ren. He’s pestering me like a bored child.” 

“I’ll be in the transport,” Ren says, hurt. He dislikes very much how this statement does make him feel like a child: like Ben, ready to lash out and kick a piece of furniture over because no one respects him. He could tear all of this down with his bare hands, and still he’s laughed at, dismissed, treated like a nuisance. 

He walks across the rocky earth outside and back to the transport, hoping that Hux is worried that he’ll take off and leave him here. But Hux probably knows that Ren won’t leave. Ren might be wiser to wonder if Hux cares either way. He paces across the transport, drags his hands through his hair and fights the urge to talk to himself as if Hux is here listening. _Yes, I fucked up. I fucked up a lot of things back then, and so did you. You blew up five planets. That’s worse than keeping a vague suspicion that you may have had a sibling onboard your ship from you, can you not see that? Do you really see yourself as some kind of wronged innocent?_

Back when they had their original fight about this, Hux had looked at Ren as if he was suddenly a stranger. Ren knew that look from people he loved too well already. It made him vicious and defensive where he should have been groveling, weeping, on his knees and begging Hux to forgive him. But all of that seemed insane at the time; it was Hux who had been wrong, Ren was sure of it. _What difference does it make, when he clearly wants nothing to do with you?_

Ren grits his teeth, hearing himself say that and worse, all over again. This was months after Techie and Matt left, and after Ren had been the one to comfort Hux in the days and weeks that followed. There was no prolonged or dramatic breakdown, but Hux was quieter and more prone to letting Ren hold him in bed, sometimes even before sex. He would cling to Ren and think over and over again of himself as somebody no one wanted. Ren wanted to tell him, _I want you more than he ever could, more than anyone ever has, that’s why I’ve taken such pains to keep you all to myself_. But he couldn’t confess to reading Hux’s thoughts, or to having had his suspicions about Techie all that time, until of course he did confess, because the secret grew like a rotting thing that took up more and more space between them as the months passed and Hux couldn’t ignore the persistent feeling that Ren must have known something. 

Ren is seated in the middle of the transport’s main chamber, despairing, when Matt approaches. He stands outside and waits for Ren to lower the ramp. The sun has dimmed and the wind has picked up a little, carrying the smell of the bog more heavily. 

“You hungry?” Matt asks. 

“I guess.” Ren hears himself sounding like a child, regressing, and winces. “Is Hux awake?”

“Yeah, we’re about to eat dinner. You’re, like. Invited, of course.” 

Matt’s energy glows with unmissable pride at being able to invite Kylo Ren to dinner. He was always pestering Ren at the gym about doing something afterward, ‘hanging out.’ And now here they are: Snoke dead, Hux a rankless fugitive, Techie and Matt flourishing in the wild, Ren in excruciating limbo and glad to have this invitation. 

The walk back to the tower feels humiliating, perhaps because of this undeniable gratitude that he once never could have anticipated. A low, keening sound from somewhere far out in the ocean draws his eye, and he sees the glowing creatures just under the surface of the water, near the shore. Ren once saw them in Hux’s dreams of this place, back when he was treading all over Hux in an attempt to possess him. 

“Do you eat them?” Ren asks, gesturing to the glowing fish and eels. 

“I do,” Matt says. “Techie doesn’t really like fish.” 

“He can afford to be picky, here?”

“Yeah, there are all kinds of of things in the woods there, plus the canyon on the other side. We’re having phoboar tenderloin tonight. Since it’s a special occasion.” 

Ren snorts at that description of what’s happening, though it’s not inaccurate. He’s not sure now what he thought his reunion with Hux would feel like. He knew he would bring Hux here, and that Hux would still be angry about what happened years ago. In the years that followed the reveal of Ren’s betrayal they still had to work together, had to face Snoke with tight jaws and shoulders aligned, and sometimes they still fucked in angry outbursts that left them both feeling hollow and like they were missing some bits that the other had stolen during the distraction of sex. They never lingered in each other’s beds, often didn’t make it to a bed at all, and every time Ren tested Hux’s thoughts to see if he was willing to forgive, Hux would snarl against the intrusion into his mind, projecting all his enraged pain back onto Ren like throwing a handful of stinging nettles. 

Inside the tower, Techie has set up the dinner on the second floor to accommodate Hux’s ankle injury, spreading dishes out over a blanket on the floor as if it’s a picnic. Hux is seated on the floor with his back to the sofa, his right leg stretched out and sporting a fresh bacta pad under his rolled-up pant leg. He meets Ren’s eyes with something that looks strangely like apology, or some other kind of entreaty. Maybe he only wants Ren to behave like a decent guest for his brother’s little dinner party. 

Ren sits with his back to the sofa, too, beside Hux but not overly close to him. He accepts a cup of foul-tasting wine made from some berries that apparently grow on the walls of the canyon he hasn’t seen yet. The food is better than the drink: tender meat, oily noodles, a salad made from some kind of seaweed. At first there’s a lot of awkward silence, everyone shoveling food into their mouths and commenting only on its quality. Then more wine is poured for everyone and Ren notices that Techie is smiling kind of dreamily at Hux. 

“I was worried,” Techie says when Hux looks up from his plate and notices this attention. “We didn’t know what was going on with the Order, like, the leadership or whatever, but we knew Starkiller got, um. Destroyed. And I thought, oh, Hux might have been, you know. On it, and like. Dead.”

“Well, here I am,” Hux says, returning his eyes to his plate. “I made it off at the last moment, tasked with finding Ren for Snoke. Upon his delivery I was blamed for the whole fiasco, of course.”

“I guess the Republic blamed you, too,” Matt says. “For using Starkiller.” He’s righteously angry but still nervous about saying so in present company, not sure how to proceed. Ren can tell all of this without even using the Force.

“Yes,” Hux says. “They’d string me up by my ankles if they could find me.” 

“Do you regret it. At all.” 

Hux looks up at Matt. Ren glances at Techie, trying to discern his feelings on the matter. They’re complicated, he finds, only skimming lightly. Techie didn’t like having Ren in his head. Nobody likes it, not even Hux. Rey made him promise to stop. He intends to keep his word, but it’s not an easy habit to break, like most of how he lived his life prior to Snoke’s demise. 

“I’m still thinking about it,” Hux says. “There’s a lot of regret to parse.”

“You killed all those people just so you could lose the war.” 

“How about some dessert?” Techie asks, practically shrieking this and jumping up from the blanket. He gives Matt a pleading look, but Matt is looking down at his hands, mourning something that isn’t the Hosnian system, exactly. 

“Speaking of deserting,” Hux says, staring at Matt. “If it hadn’t been for your attempt to flee the Order, my brother might have died on Starkiller base or in one of the battles that followed. So I must thank you, really. For your instinct to run. I’d learned to ignore mine long ago, in childhood. Maybe that wasn’t for the best, after all.” 

“I don’t need your forgiveness,” Matt says, mumbling. 

“And I don’t expect to have yours. It’s a trite concept, anyway.” Hux glances at Ren. “Any obsession with the past shouldn’t be fostered. That’s what the collapse of the Order taught me. That’s why they failed. Why I did, too. So, yes, I regret lots of things. It can be hard to put them all in order, and to-- Draw it to scale even in my own mind.” Hux swallows and looks at Techie. He’s frozen and fretting, trying to decide how to diffuse this situation, if the introduction of dessert won’t do it. “Thank you,” Hux says, almost soundlessly, to Techie. “For-- Dinner, for. Everything. You were right to leave, both times. And now you’re here, and I still can’t believe you’re real, but I’d like to be someone who knows you. Even if you won’t like what you find when you get to know me.” 

“I’ll like it,” Techie says, voice pinched. “I-- I will, I know. Lots of things happened, but. I don’t know, I’m just-- I always hoped you’d come.” 

“That’s true,” Matt says. “He did.” 

That statement hangs in the air while everyone seems to wait to know what to do next. Techie moves first, babbling about dessert again as he heads toward the stairs, and Matt follows him. Ren glances over at Hux, who seems to be deflating, his eyes unfocused. The cut on his cheek has almost disappeared. 

“I thought he’d hate me for wanting to execute him three years ago,” Hux says. “Not for the Hosnian system. Stupid of me, but characteristic. I have a talent for catastrophic oversight, if nothing else.” 

“You have other talents,” Ren says. 

Hux scoffs. He looks very tired, or maybe Ren is sensing that through the Force. He wants to move closer, wants Hux to lean onto him for support, wants to see if Hux’s hair is softer than it used to be, at this shorter length. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” Hux says, and he moves his hand toward Ren’s thigh on the blanket, just short of touching him. 

“You are?” Ren isn’t sure why he hears Han Solo in this particular expression of disbelief, but he does.

“Yes,” Hux says, so quietly that Ren has to assume he regrets saying so. “I’d hate to be here with these two by myself. Or anywhere, without-- Nobody really-- You’re the only one who understands any of it, of course.” 

Ren’s eyebrows shoot up. He opens his mouth to ask if Hux is drunk, but Techie is already hurrying back down the stairs, bearing what looks like a little cake with creamy white frosting.

Techie does most of the talking while the others eat cake, Ren forcing his down despite his lack of appetite and the off-putting graininess of the frosting. The conversation doesn’t grow heavy again: Techie only discusses the weather, local wildlife, and his love of ocean swimming, which he frames as some kind of miraculous circumstance. Even the visits from Traders don’t come up. Hux seems content to avoid serious issues, nodding along and smiling at Techie as if this sprawling monologue is charming.  

Ren uses the Force to help Techie and Matt carry the dishes up to the third floor. They offer him the use of their shower, but Ren can’t imagine how that wouldn’t lead to awkwardness and is too eager to return to Hux to bother with getting clean. There’s also a tub, a basic wooden thing under the window that’s across from Matt and Techie’s bed, and Ren envisions helping Hux into it, washing his back and helping him rinse his hair clean. Maybe tomorrow. 

Downstairs, Hux has pulled himself back onto the sofa. The lantern in the corner is still lit, burning low now. Ren stands over the sofa and studies Hux’s eyes, hoping that he appreciates the restraint Ren is exercising in not even gently poking at his thoughts right now.

“I heard you’re glad I’m here,” Ren says. “Seems unlikely, but this information came from a reliable source.” 

“Shut up and get in,” Hux says, scooting over to make room. “This bedding would be optimal with some additional body heat.”

“Ah,” Ren says, trying not to grin as he yanks off his boots. Hux might interpret it as gloating and change his mind. “So you’re just glad to have a sentient temperature regulator.” 

“That’s one term for what you are,” Hux says. He holds the blankets up so Ren can slide beneath them. It’s the best thing Ren has seen in years: this gesture, the only invitation he really wants.

“What are some other terms?” Ren asks. He stretches out alongside Hux, pulls him into his arms and closes his eyes, presses his face into Hux’s hair. It is softer, tickling against Ren’s cheeks and smelling of dried sweat, salty air. 

“Mhm,” Hux says, either pretending to consider the question or just reveling in this feeling. He nudges his face against Ren’s throat, shoves his thigh up between Ren’s legs and twines himself into this feeling just as enthusiastically as Ren, not even protesting when Ren kisses the top of his head. “You’re my-- What did I used to call you?” 

“You once called me your person.” 

“Oh. Well, that’s just vague enough to work, I suppose.” 

“But nobody else could claim the title. I hope.” 

“Of course not. Didn’t I just say so?” Hux shifts in Ren’s arms and lifts his face so that their lips are just nearly touching, their heads resting on the same thin pillow. “You’re the only person in the galaxy who cares if I live or die. Except for those who want me hanged. And their concern is of a different stripe.” 

“Techie cares about you. He missed you all this time.” 

“Missed what? He doesn’t even know me.” 

Ren runs his hand over Hux’s hair, can’t stop feeling its new texture. He feels like Techie must have when he suddenly found himself swimming in the ocean: this is the smallest thing, and the most miraculous thing, too good for him to have but enveloping him anyway. Terrifying, and also keeping him afloat.

“He does know you, though,” Ren says. It feels like the conclusion of his long ago confession, all these years later. “In some intrinsic way.” 

“Intrinsic,” Hux mutters, pronouncing the word as if it’s a spiritual term he objects to. He returns his face to Ren’s throat, maybe avoiding a kiss. “I suppose you’d know better than I. You’ve always known more about him than I have.” 

“Hux.” Apologizing would be wrong, too small. This entire journey was an apology: Ren brought Hux here to give him what he never should have kept from him. “I was afraid to lose you,” Ren says. “I thought maybe you’d still want to fuck, the way we still fucked after things were ruined, but that you wouldn't want to talk to me anymore. Or need to confide in me. You’d have him instead.” 

“I had no idea you were so massively insecure.” 

“Yes, you did.”

“Maybe I had a suspicion, but really, Ren-- Really? You thought I could replace you with anyone?” 

“Not with anyone. But with someone who had this connection to you that I never would. You know-- My mother and my uncle were twins.”

“Yes, dual traitors to you that they were. I did consider it. What you did was still immeasurably monstrous.” 

“Then we have that in common,” Ren says, as lightly as he can. Ren was never in favor of firing Starkiller. Even Hux was afraid of its power when he first showed Ren the design. Then things changed, and Hux’s hesitation evaporated. Ren is willing to share the blame. 

“I don’t like waste,” Hux says. He sounds like he’s talking more to himself than to Ren. His lips feel dry on Ren’s skin, brushing him like an insect’s wings. “And he’s-- He’s not wrong that it was a waste. What I did.”

“He?”

“Matt.”

“Oh.” 

Ren pets Hux’s hair with increased fervor, subtly encouraging him to lift his face so they can kiss. Upstairs, Matt and Techie are speaking at a low volume in the dark, their voices distinct but the words unintelligible. When Hux finally lifts his face, Ren kisses him quickly over the bridge of his nose, afraid it might be his only chance even as they lie under a blanket together, both holding on tight. For a moment Ren considers, with nauseating regret, that it might have always been this easy to crawl back into Hux’s arms, but it wouldn’t have been like this at all before they both lost everything. It all had to shatter first. 

“What’ll I do?” Hux asks, whispering. “Ren. It’s all gone. Even the prison gave me a sense of purpose. Survival, that’s all I know how to do. I can’t just settle into some comfortable divot. I can’t ever show my face in civilization again. So what’s left?” 

“I could teach you how to swim.” 

“What?” Hux looks concerned about Ren’s sanity for a moment. Then he laughs, dry and short. “Why do I ever try to predict what you’ll say or do?” he asks, smiling when Ren’s lips bump against his. “I’m never right. I was sure you’d forgotten me, or that the scavenger had found you and killed you.” 

“She tried, a few times. Then we came to an understanding.” 

“Anyway, I know how to swim.”

“Mhm. There are other things you might be taught.” 

Hux opens his mouth, and Ren kisses him before he can say whatever sarcastic comment he had planned. Hux allows it, moaning at the back of his throat in a way that seems self-scolding even as he licks into Ren’s mouth like he’s chasing the taste of that grainy frosting. 

“I don’t even know how to do this anymore,” Hux says, mumbling this against Ren’s mouth in mid-kiss. It’s not true: he’s doing so well, he’s perfect.

“Allow me to remind you,” Ren says, because at least he can pretend he has something to teach Hux, who laughs against his mouth and opens for his tongue again. 

They did teach each other everything about this, once. Why it feels good to stay after sex and listen to the other person breathe. Why it’s worthwhile to watch someone sleep, or to let them watch you and believe that you don’t know. Ren remembers already why this is so good, too, from the few occasions they let themselves have it: lazy kissing while writhing against each other in an half-conscious effort to get closer, closer. 

“What did the glass jar look like?” Hux asks when the tower is very quiet and the noises from the ocean are moving through the air like liquid music, layered atop each other, soothing and unnerving at the same time. 

“There wasn’t really a glass jar,” Ren says. He’s close to sleeping, his hand pushed up under Hux’s shirt and resting over the base of his spine, against his skin. 

“The holocron thing, though. Was that metaphorical, too, or did Snoke really have one?”

“He really had one.”

“With me in it?”

“Your location, yes.”

“Well, what did it look like?”

Ren is almost tired enough to ask why it matters, but for once he doesn’t say the wrong thing.

“They come in various shapes,” he says, though it might be more accurate to say ‘are made’ rather than ‘they come,’ as if they grow on trees. “Yours was triangular. The concentrated dark energy used to trap the information was not unlike what we harvested for Starkiller.” 

“How poetic.” 

“Mm. In the center was a kind of reddish energy. It moved, like-- something constantly blooming, wilting and blooming again.” 

Hux sniffs out a little laugh and rubs his face into the space between Ren’s arm and shoulder.

“Was it very hard to destroy?” he asks, his voice sinking with each word, as if he’s afraid the answer will be: of course not. Were you not there when I destroyed you before, so easily?

“It was a delicate process that took hours,” Ren says. “I was sweating, and caked in other knowledge and memories that I didn’t want, things that had seeped out of the others. But I could feel you, when I pulled it open. Piece by piece, a little more of you, a little at a time. You have to be careful or the secret inside will be destroyed, too.”

Hux stiffens. “Yes,” he says. “That seems intuitive. Or true of anything that has a secret.”  

“I ran to my transport as soon as I knew where you were. There’s a pile of intact holocrons still there in Snoke’s fortress, unopened.” 

“Might we collect them and sell them to someone?” 

“Mhm, no. That wouldn’t be wise.” 

“But would it be profitable?”

“What do you need credits for?”

“I don’t know!” Hux adjusts in Ren’s arms and peeks up at his face. He looks fearful, defiant, beautifully raw in the light from this planet’s moon. “I was thinking about investigating the Trader network,” he says. “I’m not just going to sit around here and weave fishing nets with my brother.” 

Ren falls asleep while trying to come up with the right response to that remark. He dreams of Hux gathering up piles of holocrons into dirty sacks, hissing at Ren when he tries to come near. 

“This is stupid,” Ren says in the dream. “You don’t even know why you’re doing it.” 

“Power,” Hux says flatly, in a voice that sounds like Snoke’s. 

“At the height of your power you were more miserable than ever.” 

“I could say the same for you,” Hux says, this time in his own voice. 

“Exactly!” Ren shouts, and when he wakes from this dream he feels like he needs to hang on to as many handfuls of it as he can keep, but the real Hux is squirming against him and making displeased noises. 

“Do you hear that?” Hux whispers.

It’s dawn, and Ren does hear something: those ocean noises, only they sound more like urgent moaning now, and the knocking of the bamstock trunks is almost drum-like.

“Oh,” Ren says when he realizes what those noises really are.

“Are they _fucking_ up there?” Hux asks, nose wrinkling. 

“Sounds like it.” 

“That’s-- Ah! Rather disrespectful, don’t you think? They couldn’t wait?”

“Until when? They don’t know when we’re leaving.” 

Ren presses his hands over Hux’s delicate ears and kisses the scowl off his lips. Hux sighs when Ren bumps his erection hopefully against Hux’s thigh, wanting to suggest that they might as well, since they’re awake and since sex is already happening elsewhere in this residence. 

They don’t actually fuck until three cycles later, when Hux’s ankle is fully healed. Hux insists they do it inside the transport, so they won’t be overheard. Ren decides not to mention that the thing rocks visibly on its landing gear when Ren fucks Hux hard against its durasteel walls. Hux will figure it out eventually, and Ren will say, I thought you knew?

So lying by omission is a bad habit he hasn’t entirely broken, but he feels he’s made progress, at least not failing to mention anything life changing. Techie and Matt surely know why they take their daily or sometimes twice daily walks out to the transport anyway. Hux has told them Ren is teaching him to meditate, which Ren has actually offered to do, a suggestion that was met with laughter from Hux. 

The other habit that’s hard to break is snooping, but Ren has mostly stopped using the Force to spy on people’s thoughts and feelings. He does stand just out of sight and listen to Techie and Hux talking sometimes, observing the progress of their twin bond. 

“I still dream about her,” Techie says when Ren is on the stairs that lead up to the third floor, where Hux and Techie sometimes sit and drink tea, usually while Ren is helping Matt with fishing chores.

Ren pauses on the stairs, his heart beating because when he knows this is wrong. But he wants to hear Hux’s response. 

“I’ve considered asking Ren to do it to me, too,” Hux says. “So I could hear her voice, and just-- Know her, even like that.” 

“It’s-- No, it’s horrible, though! She’s so upset, and we are, too, and you _feel_ it when he’s, when he’s looking. Like it’s happening all over again, so. I wouldn’t, um, ask for that if I were you.” 

“But aren’t you glad to have something of her, rather than nothing at all?”

“Yeah, yes, sure, but-- Since I have it, like, it’s yours, too. You don’t have to go through the hard part, I mean-- I did already, for both of us.” 

Some kind of automatic jealousy alarm that Ren didn’t know he’d set within himself goes off when Hux puts his arm around Techie and pulls him close. Techie scoots into this embrace and rests his head on Hux’s shoulder. Ren pulls away from them, hoping they won’t have felt his Force sense going rogue and slithering all over their moment. 

“I did some poking about after you left the Order,” Hux says. He’s speaking softly, afraid that saying so will make what he wants to do too real, along with the disappointment that might come with it. Ren doesn’t need to use the Force to know that. “I didn’t find anything, but we could look again now. I was cautious before, since all the networks are monitored and everything I searched for as General was potentially prone to scrutiny. I suppose that sounds paranoid, but--”

“It doesn’t sound paranoid, um. To me.” 

“I’ve thought of looking for my mentor, Rae. Or at least sending Ren in search of her. Though the thought of sending him away--” 

Something about the abruptness with which Hux stops speaking makes Ren wonder if he knows he’s being eavesdropped upon and by whom. 

“I know,” Techie says, and that’s the point at which Ren decides he’s being too cruel, overhearing this. He makes his way back down the stairs as quietly as he can and out of the tower altogether, rejoining Matt on the beach. 

“Everything okay in there?” Matt asks, keeping his eyes on the fish he’s gutting. His glasses are smudged with something that might be fish grease. 

“Of course,” Ren says. 

“You didn’t bring the salt.” 

“Oh-- Right.” He’d forgotten he was getting it. He shrugs when Matt looks up at him. “They were having a moment upstairs. Didn’t want to interrupt.” 

“Yeah, that’ll happen.” 

There doesn’t seem to be any sarcasm buried in this observation. Matt passes a bundle of filthy hooks across his work bench. Ren cleans them with the Force, insulted on behalf of his immense power, this waste of his gift, but also aware that Rey would be proud of him for doing this instead of slaughtering, interrogating, etc.

The sun is out today, and the ocean is a very light green, choppy and sparkling. Hux and Techie emerge after their tea, Techie carrying an umbrella that he holds over himself and Hux as they make their way toward the dock. Techie has been teaching Hux how to fish. Ren is envious, but he’s never fished and wouldn’t know how to be a good teacher in that respect. Techie is relatively new to it himself, so Hux isn’t intimidated by his prowess. It’s also just enchanting, in a way, watching Techie hold the umbrella over Hux and give pointers while Hux gracelessly wields the homemade fishing pole, usually catching nothing. 

_I’ll go anywhere for you_ , Ren thinks, not sure if Hux will feel even the slightest flicker of this sentiment borne toward him on the Force. _But please don’t send me away. Not yet._

Hux turns, squinting in the sunlight. Techie does, too. At this distance, with their eyes nearly shut against the glare from the sun, they look properly identical. Ren feels a surge of something like irreversible, crystallizing love for both of them, witnessing this. It’s not an identical love, but one sort is related to the other, dragged along with it. He lifts his hand, and Matt turns toward them to do the same. Matt always did like copying him. 

Techie turns back to the water and Matt looks back to his fish. Hux keeps his eyes on Ren. He’s smiling at the corner of his mouth, trying to send something back. It’s a look more than anything, but it hits Ren just as clearly as Force-sent words.

 _I know_ , it says. _Don’t fret, I’m here, I’m listening_. 

Ren wants to cross the beach and crowd around Hux, to help him hold the fishing pole and kiss his neck, but there’s no room for him beneath the twins’ umbrella, and he’s learning how to love without the need for suffocating proximity. Life is a process of breaking bad habits that we can hardly blame ourselves for having, Luke said once. Ren can blame himself. He can change, too, in this place where even the ocean can shift entirely and right before their eyes, dark and light and many colors in between.

 

 

**


End file.
